So the English made this a great fortified place, humming with naval and military activity; men-of-war lying in the bay, guns bristling in the beautiful old fort that guards the cliff. And now all that too is gone—blown away like a wreath of mist, and the only soldiers and sailors are those who will stay forever in the little grave-place under the palms, and if it so continues I daresay the jungle will take Trincomali as it has taken the City of Kings.
A beautiful place. I wandered on the beach among the shells one marvelled to see as a child, when sailor friends gave them into eager hands—deep brown freckled polished things, leopard-spotted and ivory-lipped, and so smooth that the hand slips off the perfect surface. Delicate frailties of opal and pearl shimmering with mystic colour, spiny grotesques with long thorned stems—there they all lay for the gathering. And at last I went up into the old fort.
It covers many acres on the cliff and the jungle is steadily conquering the empty bungalows and fortifications. It is very old, for the Dutch built it in 1650. Now in the thickets the forsaken guns make an empty bravado like toothless lions. I saw a deer and her fawn come peering shyly through the bushes, and they fled before me. The casements are empty and a flagless flagstaff looks over the heavenly calm of the sea.
Almost lost in the shade I found some old Dutch graves, very square and formal—a something of the rigidity of the burgomaster about them still, as of stiff-ruffed men and women. “Here sleeps in God—” said one mossy inscription (but in Dutch)—and then a break, and then “Johanna” and another break, and only a word here and there and a long obliterated date. And the Dutch were masters and Johanna slept in the ground of her people as securely as if it had been The Hague itself. So it must then have seemed. And now it is English, and whose next? Truly the fashion of this world passeth away! They were touching, those old tombs, with inscriptions that once were watered with tears, that no one now cares to decipher. And there they lie forgotten in the sighing trees, and the world goes by. The dominion of oblivion is secure, whatever that of death may be.
I climbed down to a casement in the cliff, half-way to the sea, a little shelf overlooking the blue transparence that met the blue horizon, and wondered what the grave God-fearing talk of the Dutchmen had been as they leaned over the parapet, discussing the ways of the heathen and the encroachments of the British. And from there I made my way to the rocks below with the brilliant water heaving about them. Some large fish of the most perfect forget-me-not blue shading into periwinkle mauve on the fins were playing before me, and as they rolled over, or a ripple took them they displayed the underside, a faint rose pink. Such beautiful happy creatures in the wash of the wandering water clear and liquid as light! Sometimes they wavered like moons under a ripple, a blot of heavenliest blue, submerged and quivering, sometimes a shoal of black fish barred with gold swam in among them, beautiful to see. I could have stayed all day, for it was heavenly cool, with a soft sea breeze blowing through the rocks, but even as I watched a great brown monster came wallowing through the water, and my beauties fled like swallows.
The touch of tragedy was not wanting, for high on the cliff was a little pillar to the memory of a Dutch girl who fell in love long ago with an Englishman—a false lover, who sailed away and left her heartbroken. Here she watched his sails lessening along the sky, and as they dipped below the horizon, she threw herself over the cliff in unendurable anguish.
A tragic story, but it is all so long ago that it has fallen back into the beauty of nature and is now no more sad than a sunset that casts its melancholy glory before it fades. Yet I wonder whether in all the hide and seek of rebirth she has caught up somewhere with her Englishman! She knows all about Psyche’s wings by this time, and he too must have gained a dear-bought wisdom through “the great mercy of the gift of departing,” as the Buddhists call it . . . they to whom death is so small an episode in so long a story.
I sat by the pillar and watched the dying torch of the sunset extinguished in the sea—a sea of glass mingled with fire. And very quietly the stars appeared one by one in a violet sky and it was night.
THE WONDERFUL PILGRIMAGE TO AMARNATH