Night, striding over the mountains in the seven-league boots he wears in the tropics, playfully laid hand on me just at the entrance to the inn of the Sign of the Palm Tree. The landlord demanded no fee; the far-off howling of dogs lulled me to sleep. With dawn, I was off once more. Sunrise waved his greeting over the leafy crests of the Peradiniya Gardens, and her European residents, lolling in their church-bound ’rickshaws, stared at my entrance into the ancient city of Kandy.
Centuries ago, this mountain-girdled metropolis of the interior was the seat of the native king. To-day, the monarch of Ceylon is a bluff Englishman, housed within sight of the harbor of Colombo in a stone mansion more appropriate to Regent’s Row than to this land of swaying palm trees. The descendant of the native dynasty still holds his mock court in the capital of his forefathers, struggling against the encroachment of trousers and cravats and the wiles of courtiers stoop-shouldered with the wisdom of Oxford and Cambridge. But his duties have narrowed down to that of upholding the ancestral religion. For Kandy is a holy city. Buddhists, not merely of Ceylon but of India and the equatorial islands, make pilgrimage to its ancient shrine. Long before the coming of the Nazarene, tradition whispers, there was found in Burma one of the teeth of Gautama, the Enlightened One. How it came to be picked up thus far from the burial place of the Wandering Prince is as inexplicable as the discovery of splinters of the true Cross in strange and sundry regions far distant from Calvary. Be that as it may, a rich embassy from the king of Burma bore the relic to this egg-shaped island, and over it was erected the celebrated “Temple of the Tooth.”
The woman who sold me the bananas
The thatch roof at the roadside, under which I slept on the second night of my tramp to Kandy
It is a time-worn structure of gray stone, simple in architecture from the view point of the Orient, set in a lotus grove on the shores of a crystal-clear lake. Mindful of the assaults that I had more than once provoked by entering a house of worship in the East, I contented myself with a circuit of its double, crenelated walls and a peep up the broad steps that led to the interior.
The keeper of the inn to which fate assigned me had two sons, who, thanks to the local mission-school, spoke fluent English. The older was a youth of fifteen. In the West he would have been rated a child. Here he was accepted as a man, to whom the problems of life had already taken form. Our conversation turned naturally to the subject of religion; naturally, because that subject is always first and foremost in the East. His religion sets for the Oriental his place in the community; it tells him what work he shall do all the days of his life, what his children and his children’s children shall do. According to the dictates of his faith he eats or refrains from eating, he seeks repose or watches out the night, he greets his fellow-beings or shuns them like dogs. Society is honey-combed with sects and creeds and castes. Every man wears some visible symbol of his religion, and before all else he scrutinizes the sign of caste of any stranger with whom he comes in contact. No secondary matter, nor something to be aired once a week, is a man’s religion in the East. It stalks at his heels as relentlessly as his shadow at noonday.
“I suppose,” I was saying, soon after the son of the innkeeper had broached this unavoidable topic, “I suppose that, as you have been educated in a Protestant school, you are a Christian?”
The youth eyed me for a moment with noncommittal gravity.