One of the bullock gigs, so common in Colombo, stopped suddenly before that hostelry. The driver, who had jumped to the ground, was examining the animal with much surprise. In the mean time, the bullock was staggering like a drunken man, reeling hither and thither while striving to keep upon its feet, shaking its head strangely in a wild sort of way, and trembling all over. The thermometer was somewhere between 95° and 100° Fahr. A score of idle and curious natives thronged about the spot, entirely shutting out the circulation of what little fresh air there was stirring. At this moment a cavalryman from the barracks hard by made his way into the crowd, and seizing the bullock's nose he bade the driver hold him steadily by the horns. Taking a knife from his pocket, the new-comer forced the animal's mouth open and adroitly made a deep incision in one of the bars which form the roof, instantly causing the blood to flow freely therefrom. After the lapse of a very few minutes, the bullock recovered, standing once more quite firmly upon its feet, as soon as the pressure upon its brain was relieved by the flow of blood. The creature had experienced an attack of what in horses is called blind-staggers, produced by a rush of blood to the brain, undoubtedly occasioned in this instance by the great heat and by over-exertion. The cavalryman's readiness with his knife produced just the sort of relief which was required in such an exigency.
"The bullock could not have been driven very fast," said an English lady, who had regarded the scene intently from the piazza of the hotel, "because it does not perspire at all; see, its hide is perfectly dry."
"That sort of hanimal doesn't sweat only on the nose," said the cavalryman, as he coolly wiped his knife and returned it to his pocket, adding, "'Orses does, but hoxen doesn't."
It is a noticeable fact that European horses cannot endure the climate of Ceylon; some which are imported from Australia manage to give satisfaction for a limited period. The breeding of these animals is not a success in the island, and the natives do not use them at all.
Colombo has a hundred and thirty thousand inhabitants, and is divided into what is known as The Fort and Black Town, the former being the portion devoted to the official quarters and the residences of the English, the latter mostly to the very humble homes of the natives. Black Town is quite oriental and very dirty, dispensing a most unmistakable odor like a faint tincture of musk. It stretches along the harbor front for more than a mile, until it ends at the Kalani River, and contains a most heterogeneous mingling of races, each individual decked in some distinctive garb of his original nationality, the majority, however, exhibiting only the bronzed skin covering to their bones which nature provides. Even these nude figures form an anomalous sight, often having their heads covered with monstrous, elaborate white turbans, and only a thin piece of cotton about their loins. The houses, or cabins as they would more properly be called, are of one story, dingy and poor, generally constructed of mud upon bamboo frames, with a thatched roof of dried palm leaves so braided together as to make a stout and secure protection from the rain. The fronts of these simple houses are quite open, revealing all sorts of domestic habits incident to native life, and very often outraging one's sense of propriety. Men or women care nothing for publicity, and do not hesitate in the conduct of affairs which are strictly of a personal nature.
If one desires a remedy for over-fastidiousness, let him stroll for a while about this native portion of Colombo. He will open his eyes in surprise now and then, but it is astonishing how soon one becomes indifferent to the most peculiar local customs, whether in Samoa, Japan, or among the Alaska Indians. The lazy Singhalese or Tamil men lying half asleep upon the ground, the women, semi-nude, cooking fish over a brazier in the open air, and a group of naked children playing in the roadway, form a common tableau in this quarter of the town. Every necessity seems to be provided for by the salubrity of the climate and the spontaneity of the soil. Enterprise, emulation, ambition, are to these people unknown incentives to action. The height of their desire is plenty of sleep and plenty to eat.
The scene is occasionally varied by a group of men sitting upon their heels and absorbed in gambling for small sums of money. It should be stated here that the natives, Singhalese, Tamils, Moormen, or of whatever tribe, are all inveterate gamblers; only the Chinese can equal them in this propensity to risk all they possess upon the cast of the dice, or in betting upon some other trivial game. We were told of instances where the gambler, having lost everything else, staked the possession of his wife against his opponent's money, and, losing, the woman quietly acquiesced in consummating the arrangement. Women of the humbler castes are looked upon more as slaves than as filling any other relation to those whom they call their husbands. As a rule, they would not think of asserting any will of their own. As their husbands are abject slaves to the idea of caste, so they are slaves to their husbands, and however roughly they are treated by them, they take it quite as a matter of course. In the southern part of the island especially, each village has its cock-pit and its gambling-den; while hard by is the drinking-cabin, where for a few pennies a native can get very drunk on arrack.
At some of the low-thatched cabins in the Pettah, or Black Town, we see a tame parrot or a pet monkey confined within certain bounds by a small chain. If the former, he is likely to be imitating the boisterous exclamations of the children; if the latter, finding no mischief possible, he sits chin in hand, with a ludicrously grave expression on his too human features. The ever-present crows take good care to keep out of the monkey's reach, but perch familiarly and fearlessly anywhere else about the cabins. There are several varieties of monkeys in the island. The black wanderoo of Ceylon with white whiskers comes nearest in its resemblance to the human face. He stands three feet high, and weighs between seventy and eighty pounds, being remarkable for muscular strength. The lower and the upper jaw are in a direct line with the forehead, while most of the race have projecting jaws.
The streets and environs of Constantinople are rendered hardly more disagreeable by the presence of mongrel curs than is Black Town, Colombo. Dogs abound, thoroughly useless creatures, which should have been born jackals, and which are perhaps partly breeds from that source. They are melancholy, half-starved, wretched, and mangy creatures, sleeping all day, and prowling about at night in search of some stray bit of carrion which has escaped the vigilance of the crows. Why they are tolerated no one can say, neither does any one acknowledge their ownership. Occasionally one runs mad, causing by his bite a half-dozen natives to do likewise, when death is certain. Hydrophobia is never cured, not even by the devil-dancers of Ceylon. The normal appearance of these dogs is that of abject fear, as they move about with heads drooping and their tails pressed close between their hind legs. A harsh word sends them off at top speed, while a kind one brings out their instinctive fondness for the human race. Still, they are nuisances in Ceylon, and of no earthly good to any mortal.
Evil odors are inseparable from the native quarters. That goes without saying, and it is surprising that pestilence does not run riot here. Dirt and contagious diseases certainly thrive in the same atmosphere, and yet one often sees sanitary laws, as we construe them, deliberately outraged without any such results as our best reason would lead us to expect. The author was in Rio Janeiro not long since, at a time when the yellow fever was proving fatal to fifty or sixty persons daily. In the Plaza Don Pedro Second, numbers of idle, lazy fellows lay half drunk, or wholly so, sleeping on the benches under a vertical sun. Some were quite unconscious, even lying upon the damp ground. Apropos of our remark that these people were inviting the fever, an intelligent resident, who was our companion, calmly answered: "Yellow Jack does not choose that class for its victims. They seem to enjoy complete immunity from the pestilence." Seeing was believing, but it was also confounding to one's sense of the eternal fitness of things.