‘How far is the river?’ I asked.
‘Good five miles; and five miles with these flood-gates of the skies opened, mean touch and go. Twenty to one, the Badulla Oya will be swollen and impassable.’
‘Is there no canoe or bridge?’
‘Canoe! What on earth, in your Ceylon griffinage, are you dreaming about? As for a bridge, well, metaphorically speaking, there is a thing which the natives call a bridge; but practically, not what you and I and the department of Public Works would class as one. However, it will not be long before you see what sort of a concern the bridge is like.’
We now hastened as fast as the animals we rode could lay hoofs to ground; but before the five miles were traversed and the banks of the river reached, we distinctly heard it roaring.
‘It is down already,’ said my companion.
Down it was with a vengeance, as we presently realised. Over a bed of rocky boulders it foamed and boiled and tumbled, a dark, deep, angry chocolate-coloured torrent, sixty feet wide at least.
Squatting under a large tree on the bank opposite to us, accepting the situation with that stolid indifference for which the Asiatic is so very remarkable, and chewing betel, that panacea for all the ills which Singhalese flesh is heir to, was a Kandian villager, well advanced in years. The judge hailed him in his own language. ‘Hi! father! Did you swim the river?’
‘Am I a fish, think you, my son?’ the man responded.
‘Did you cross it by the bridge, then?’