Once seated in the piazza of the Oriental Company‘s hotel, the best managed in the East, I had before me a curious scene. Along the streets were pouring silent crowds of tall and graceful girls, as we at the first glance supposed, wearing white petticoats and bodices; their hair carried off the face with a decorated hoop, and caught at the back by a high tortoise-shell comb. As they drew near, mustaches began to show, and I saw that they were men, while walking with them were women naked to the waist, combless, and far more rough and “manly” than their husbands. Petticoat and chignon are male institutions in Ceylon, and time after time I had to look twice before I could fix the passer‘s sex. My rule at last became to set down everybody that was womanly as a man, and everybody that was manly as a woman. Cinghalese, Kandians, Tamils from South India, and Moormen with crimson caftans and shaven crowns, formed the body of the great crowd; but, besides these, there were Portuguese, Chinese, Jews, Arabs, Parsees, Englishmen, Malays, Dutchmen, and half-caste burghers, and now and then a veiled Arabian woman or a Veddah—one of the aboriginal inhabitants of the isle. Ceylon has never been independent, and in a singular mixture of races her ports bear testimony to the number of the foreign conquests.
Two American missionaries were among the passers-by, but one of them, detecting strangers, came up to the piazza in search of news. There had been no loss of national characteristics in these men;—they were brimful of the mixture of earnestness and quaint profanity which distinguishes the New England puritan: one of them described himself to me as “just a kind of journeyman soul-saver, like.”
The Australian strangers were not long left unmolested by more serious intruders than grave Vermonters. The cry of “baksheesh”—an Arabian word that goes from Gibraltar to China, and from Ceylon to the Khyber Pass, and which has reached us in the form of “boxes” in our phrase Christmas-boxes—was the first native word I heard in the East, at Galle, as it was afterward the last, at Alexandria. One of the beggars was an Albino, fair as a child in a Hampshire lane; one of those strange sports of nature from whom Cinghalese tradition asserts the European races to be sprung.
The beggars were soon driven off by the hotel servants, and better licensed plunderers began their work. “Ah safeer, ah rupal, ah imral, ah mooney stone, ah opal, ah amtit, ah!” was the cry from every quarter, and jewel-sellers of all the nations of the East descended on us in a swarm. “Me givee you written guarantee dis real stone;” “Yes, dat real stone; but dis good stone—dat no good stone—no water. Ah, see!” “Dat no good stone. Ah, sahib, you tell good stone: all dese bad stone, reg‘lar England stone. You go by next ship? No? Ah, den you come see me shop. Dese ship-passenger stone—humbuk stone. Ship gone, den you come me shop; see good stone. When you come? eh? when you come?” “Ah, safeer, ah catty-eye, ah pinkee collal!” Meanwhile every Galle-dwelling European, at the bar of the hotel, was adding to the din by shouting to the native servants, “Boy, turn out these fellows, and stop their noise.” This cry of “boy” is a relic of the old Dutch times: it was the Hollander‘s term for his slave, and hence for every member of the inferior race. The first servant that I heard called “boy” was a tottering, white-haired old man.
The gems of Ceylon have long been famed. One thousand three hundred and seventy years ago, the Chinese records tell us that Ceylon, then tributary to the empire, sent presents to the Brother of the Moon, one of the gifts being a “lapis-lazuli spittoon.” It is probable that some portion of the million and a half pounds sterling which are annually absorbed in this small island, but four-fifths the size of Ireland, is consumed in the setting of the precious stones for native use; every one you meet wears four or five heavy silver rings, and sovereigns are melted down to make gold ornaments.
Rushing away from the screaming crowd of peddlers, I went with some of my Australian friends to stroll upon the ramparts and enjoy the evening salt breeze. We met several bodies of white-faced Europeans, sauntering like ourselves, and dressed like us in white trowsers and loose white jackets and pith hats. What we looked like I do not know, but they resembled ships’ stewards. At last it struck me that they were soldiers, and upon inquiring I found that these washed-out dawdlers represented a British regiment of the line. I was by this time used to see linesmen out of scarlet, having beheld a parade in bushranger-beards and blue-serge “jumpers” at Taranaki in New Zealand; but one puts up easier with the soldier-bushranger than with the soldier-steward.
The climate of the day had been exquisite with its bright air and cooling breeze, and I had begun to think that those who knew Acapulco and Echuca could afford to laugh at the East, with its thermometer at 88°. The reckoning came at night, however, for by dark all the breeze was gone, and the thermometer, instead of falling, had risen to 90° when I lay down to moan and wait for dawn. As I was dropping off to sleep at about four o‘clock, a native came round and closed the doors, to shut out the dangerous land-breeze that springs up at that hour. Again, at half-past five, it was cooler, and I had begun to doze, when a cannon-shot, fired apparently under my bed, brought me upon my feet with something more than a start. I remembered the saying of the Western boy before Petersburg, when he heard for the first time the five o‘clock camp-gun, and called to his next neighbor at the fire, “Say, Bill, did you hap to hear how partic‘lar loud the day broke just now?” for it was the morning-gun, which in Ceylon is always fired at the same time, there being less than an hour‘s difference between the longest and shortest days. Although it was still pitch dark, the bugles began to sound the réveille on every side—in the infantry lines, the artillery barracks, and the lines of the Malay regiment, the well-known Ceylon Rifles. Ten minutes afterward, when I had bathed by lamplight, I was eating plantains and taking my morning tea in a cool room lit by the beams of the morning sun, so short is the April twilight in Ceylon.
It is useless to consult the thermometer about heat: a European can labor in the open air in South Australia with the thermometer at 110° in the shade, while, with a thermometer at 88°, the nights are unbearable in Ceylon. To discover whether the climate of a place be really hot, examine its newspapers; and if you find the heat recorded, you may make up your mind that it is a variable climate, but if no “remarkable heat” or similar announcements appear, then you may be sure that you are in a permanently hot place. It stands to reason that no one in the tropics ever talks of “tropical heat.”
In so equable a climate, the apathy of the Cinghalese is not surprising; but they are not merely lazy, they are a cowardly, effeminate, and revengeful race. They sleep and smoke, and smoke and sleep, rousing themselves only once in the day to snatch a bowl of curry and rice, or to fleece a white man; and so slowly do the people run the race of life that even elephantiasis, common here, does not seem to put the sufferer far behind his fellow-men. Buddhism is no mystery when expounded under this climate. See a few Cinghalese stretched in the shade of a cocoa-palm, and you can conceive Buddha sitting cross-legged for ten thousand years contemplating his own perfection.
The second morning that I spent in Galle, the captain of the Bombay was kind enough to send his gig for me to the landing-steps at dawn, and his Malay crew soon rowed me to the ship, where the captain joined me, and we pulled across the harbor to Watering-place Point, and bathed in the shallow sea, out of the reach of sharks. When we had dressed, we went on to a jetty, to look into the deep water just struck by the rising sun. I should have marveled at the translucency of the waters had not the awful clearness with which the bottoms of the Canadian lakes stand revealed in evening light been fresh within my memory, but here the bottom was fairly paved with corallines of inconceivable brilliancy of color, and tenanted by still more gorgeous fish. Of the two that bore the palm, one was a little fish of mazarine blue, without a speck of any other color, and perfect too in shape; the second, a silver fish, with a band of soft brown velvet round its neck, and another about its tail. In a still more sheltered cove the fish were so thick that dozens of Moors were throwing into the water, with the arm-twist of a fly-fisher, bare hooks, which they jerked through the shoal and into the air, never failing to bring them up clothed with a fish, caught most times by the fin.