There was a band at dinner, served in a vast white hall, and after, on the terrace, when the guests would sit out among the palms lighted up by jewels of electric light. The white breakers foaming under the moon, the shadowy waving palms, the sky flashing with sheet lightning, the brilliantly lighted hotel, and the white figures flitting about “among the guests star-scattered on the grass,” all contributed to a striking stage effect.
A CINGALESE WAITER
The hotel was certainly spacious and well appointed, having large cool corridors and rooms to sit in—comparatively cool that is to say, and without the gloom of so many of the Indian hotels. In the matter of food, cookery, and the service too, it was a great improvement on the Peninsula. There were electric fans everywhere in motion, and we could always turn one on in our room—which was normally an oven. The draft from these fans, however, are said to be apt to give people chills, and some caution in their use in bedrooms is necessary.
We visited our friends in their charming house—one of the older style of Colombo dwellings, in a delightful garden where afternoon tea was served on a pleasant lawn shaded by fine trees, among which we recognised the forest flame, which with its wonderful scarlet blossoms had struck us on the way to Darjeeling, though not then in flower here.
Another day Mr Bois took us out for a drive in his motor all around Colombo and its neighbourhood. We went through the town and along by the dry dock, and through the native quarter (Zeppa or Teppa) and away through narrow lanes shaded by cocoa palms, plantains, banyans, mangoes and other trees growing with tropical luxuriance each side the way, in plantations, and around the bungalows.
The motor seemed a strange vehicle in the midst of the primitive life of the Cingalese; and it is said that extremes meet, and certainly a motor and a primitive ox-wagon represent about the greatest contrast in means of locomotion and transport that one can well imagine. It was rather wonderful that we escaped a collision sometimes meeting such vehicles in the narrow lanes, or that we avoided running over stray chickens or dogs—the latter kind always resenting the motor and imperilling their lives by running and barking in close proximity with the enemy. The natives we met walking, too, were by no means alert in getting out of the way, and did not seem to realise the danger.
IN CEYLON—EXTREMES MEET—THE MOTOR AND THE OX-CART
We passed mission houses and churches of all sorts, and of every shade of theological colour—Wesleyans, Roman Catholics, and Salvation Army—all the plagues of sectarian Christianity which afflict humanity in Europe, alas!