CHAPTER XXXIX

1898

ANURADHAPURA

In the year 1898, business took me once more to Ceylon. One of my sons had gone out there to start in life as a tea-planter, and I must needs go to see how he was faring and what were his prospects for the future. And so we set out, my daughter Iris and I, and my old friend Reginald Yorke, the best of shipmates, came with us. He, too, had a son in Ceylon, who some years later was crushed to death against a tree by a wounded elephant in East Africa.

When I first saw Ceylon in 1865 Point de Galle was the place of call for steamers—a bad and dangerous harbour, but so prodigally beautiful, with its coral reefs and its palm groves fringing the sea, studded with the quaint outrigged boats of the fisher-folk, that one could fancy oneself arriving in such an island as those into which Captain Cook felt his way in the Pacific. Galle was quite unspoilt and primitive—just like the pictures of the spice islands in the travel books of our childhood—a fitting approach to one of the fairest of God’s creations. I felt as if I should never weary of watching the intensely blue sea lapping the very roots of the cocoanut palms, which tradition said could never flourish far from the sound of its waves. Here was indeed the poetry of travel, the reward of them “that go down to the sea in ships ... and see the works of the Lord and His wonders in the deep.”

Colombo is very different, and I am glad that my first amazed sight of the tropics was at Galle, and not in a place, safe indeed, but eminently prosaic and uninspiring. Colombo is Ceylon, the land of business men, planters, jewel merchants and Dutch-hybrids; Galle was Lanka, that ancient island from which Wijayo, the invader, expelled the demons; the land of saints and heroes and kings; the land of romance and holy lore, of which the Mahawanso, “The Genealogy of the Great,” is the epic.

There was no temptation to spend a needless hour in Colombo. Happily the train soon whirls the traveller into the midst of the baffling beauty of the scenery that lies between the sea and Kandy, scenery so lovely that the traveller feels inclined to rub his eyes and ask whether this can be real, whether he is not asleep, and tasting a dream-vision of paradise.

Hatton, whither we were bound, is less beautiful, for the glory of the jungle has been ruthlessly swept away to make room for the tea-plant. Every available inch is under cultivation of what at first sight look like euonymus plants set out in a nursery gardener’s rows. Here and there are pretty villas, with gardens full of all manner of strange and attractive plants: for Hatton is a great centre, and, lying high, is very healthy, so there are many planters who come here for refreshment after months spent in the feverish damp of the lowland rubber and cocoanut plantations. And yet even here a man may turn his back upon the rupee-bearing tea-plant and feast his eyes upon a great mountain shaped like a crouching lion, or upon the distant majesty of Adam’s Peak, with its legends and its ghost. Here we stayed for some while, for there was plenty to do.

Along the road, not more than a mile or so, if my memory serves me, from Hatton, there was a small Roman Catholic chapel and graveyard, to which some good priest came from time to time, to say mass, hear confessions, and shrive his flock. It was no more than a tiny plaster hut, fifteen feet by eight, with an altar, and on the altar two candlesticks on either side of the Figure on the Cross, to which some humble, pious soul had added as ornaments his two most precious treasures: two empty Huntley and Palmer biscuit-tins! It was a most touching offering, reminding me of the widow’s mite.

Once before I had come across the traces of the great Reading potentates in a strange place. It was in Mongolia, three or four hundred miles north of Peking. I had taken refuge from the noon-day sun in a Mongol encampment, and the chieftainess, a fat, hideous old woman, shapeless in her sheepskin robe, allowed me and my companion, for a consideration, to rest in her _yurt_, a leathern tent with an opening at the top to let out the smoke of the camel-dung fire. She was a great lady in her way, though very dirty, and the outward and visible sign of her high position was a large Huntley and Palmer tin, in which were growing a few heads of garlic wherewith to flavour the mess of mutton and millet, with chunks of brick tea and salt, which was stewing in her gipsy kettle. Of that tin she was as proud as a duchess of her strawberry leaves.

When the preliminaries of my business were settled I had a few days on my hands, while the lawyers were playing their part. If the law is slow in England it will readily be conceived that it acquires no speed in the sweltering heat of Colombo; so Yorke and I determined, after seeing Neuara Eliya and Kandy, to go and explore the mysteries of the buried city of Anuradhapura far away in the north. I believe that it is now brought into touch with the rest of the world by a railway; but seventeen years ago that did not exist. So we hired a carriage and started from Matalé. We saw the carved cave temples of Dambulla and in the distance the great rock fortress of Sigiri—marvels in their way; but the attraction was Anuradhapura, the capital of the kings when Lanka had not yet become degraded into Ceylon.

For many miles the road ran through the thick, impenetrable forest—a little thinner in places close to the wayside. Here and there a small clearing and a few native huts; but for the most part not a human habitation, nor a brown man, woman, or child, to be seen. The steamy air was full of that subtle, mysterious perfume of heavily-scented flowers and rich, pungent spices which is wafted far out to sea. The very leaves of the forest seemed to thrill at the voluptuous caress of the soft, perfumed breeze. A delicious, languorous, enervating atmosphere, in which to dream and never to do. Some of the huge butterflies are very beautiful. Of birds we did not see many, nor did we hear their song—though some are said to pipe most sweetly. One bird there is that breaks the stillness with its hoarse melancholy croak in which the Singhalese imagination hears the words, “Ko Hattha Paroa! Ko Hattha Paroa! Where are the seven axes!” Just as our children hear in the call of the cushat the exhortation to the thief to “take two coos, Taffy—take two coos, Taffy.”

Once upon a time there lived in a village of Lanka a woman who had several sons, all of whom dwelt with her. One day the seven brothers went out into the forest to cut wood. The night fell, the evening meal of rice was prepared, but no sons came home to partake of it. Their mother wondered, but took no great heed, thinking that some accident had delayed them, until the next day men from a neighbouring village came and told her that her sons had been killed and eaten by wild beasts. But she being a covetous and greedy woman uttered no wail of sorrow for the lost children whom she had borne, but only cried out: “Ko Hattha Paroa! Where are the seven axes?” Oh, cruel! cruel! oh, heartless mother! whose sons were dead and she only mourned over the loss of the axes! So the Gods were wroth, and to punish her turned her into a bird, laying upon her this curse, that till the crack of doom, knowing no rest, she should flit through the darkness of the jungle, ever uttering her unhappy cry: “Where are the seven axes? Where are the seven axes?”

The road itself is the only sign of man’s handiwork. The forms and colours of the jungle are often startlingly beautiful. Some of the trees remind one of home; others, roped together by graceful lianes, are a revelation—their branching, their foliage, and their flowers a new sensation. Mixed with them are feathering bamboos, barbarously gorgeous crotons and poinsettias, and here and there an orchid, peering out of a cranny in a rock. From a great picturesque stone by the roadside I brought back two deliciously scented odontoglossums which flourished for years at Batsford.

All of a sudden, as we drove along, we were aware of a large company of monkeys, some thirty or forty of them, of all sizes and ages, running by the side of the road, just inside the thicket. They were led by an old and venerable ape, very grey, with white whiskers, the image of a Hyde Park preacher—had he only worn a shabby black coat, shiny in greasy patches and at the elbows, he would have acted the part to perfection. He was a dictatorial old gentleman, whose word was a law unto his people. I say “word,” for that he had some means of issuing his commands to them was certain; that they understood him and obeyed his orders was equally certain. Sometimes he led the way, sometimes he dropped back and gathered in stragglers. He was apparently much agitated, though we could not have been the cause, for he made no attempt to avoid us, but led his troop parallel to our carriage. After running like that for three or four hundred yards, he gave the word of command, and the whole troop crossed the road in front of us. We stopped the carriage to see what happened. After, perhaps, a hundred more yards, the monkeys disappeared into the jungle on the other side.

Suddenly we heard a rustling on the side on which the monkeys had first appeared. I was aware of two gleaming yellow eyes, and presently a great leopard, cautiously, stealthily, crept out of the dense foliage, evidently following the spoor. I could have shot him at less than ten yards. In a moment he caught sight of us as our carriage stood still in the road, gave one spring back and vanished. He doubtless was the cause of the old preacher’s strategic retreat, and our presence helped him to make it good.

When I saw those yellow eyes I could but think of the myriads of eyes lurking in the jungle, watching unseen, like Fates—eyes of birds, eyes of beasts, eyes of strange, weird insects, little beadlike eyes peering sleeplessly out of flat, triangular heads that lie deadly in the centre of glistening scaled coils. Two little pricks, no more of a wound than could be made by the point of a tiny needle, and in half an hour death—death unshriven. What a wicked, sinful, murderous jungle! How beautiful and how mysterious!

Men talk of the silence of the jungle. Is the jungle ever silent? Is there not always the murmur of leaf and bough, stirred in some mysterious way like the quivering aspen—the legendary tree of the Holy Cross, never at rest—even when there seems to be no wind? Is there not always the rustling whisper of malevolent creatures in ambush, waiting to destroy something feebler or less cunning than themselves? What a sight it would be if, as God paraded the beasts of the field and the fowls of the air before Adam that he might name them, we might cause the creatures of just one square mile of the Singhalese forest to be driven in procession before us! The variety of forms, the contrast of stature and girth, from the huge elephant down to the minutest of creeping things—what a wonder-world it would reveal!

As we neared the mystic city, the night fell. In this land there is no twilight, no delicious gloaming, no opalescent fading of the glare of day into the soft, loving mystery of night. The darkness came down like a dense black veil upon the jungle: the death of the day was sudden, remorseless. But all at once, out of the gloom there shone a great light. There was no moon, but millions upon millions of fireflies floated gracefully, dancing in the air over the jungle; it was as if the stars which were shining gloriously overhead had sent down shower after shower of dazzling sparks—tiny jewelled morsels of the Southern Cross—to illuminate our triumphant entry into what now looked like the city of some wonder-working magician. We could see the outlines of buildings, temples, palaces, and above all, here and there the great Dagobas, rising out of the plain like isolated hills covered with a pall of dense trees and lianes, piercing the darkness of the night. Once they were noble shrines of brickwork, proudly rearing their tiara-like towers heavenward, built to encase some relic of the Wise One, the Buddha; but centuries of neglect have smothered them with vegetation out of all shape, till only their great height remains of all their former glory.

Wonderful are the ways of the jungle! A leaf falls and decays into dust, settling into some chink of a mouldering wall. Little by little other leaves join it and decay into mould. A bird drops a seed; tropical rains wash it into the haven of rest; there, fulfilling its mission, it germinates in the ever moist soil, to which as a pious child it in time adds its tribute of falling foliage. More seeds are borne by other birds, or carried on the wings of the wind. More decay breeds more life, until by degrees all trace of building vanishes, swallowed up by an omnivorous parasitic growth. The work of man’s hand, the record of the ambition of kings and of a priestly caste would be lost and forgotten, but for the inquisitive West, which never rests from digging into the secrets of the East, guarded in vain by the seven-headed cobras, the Nagas of Hindu myth.

Had it not been for the learned curiosity of Mr. Turnour, the Mahawanso, the great epic poem of Ceylon, the Book of Kings of the island, would perhaps never have been deciphered, and the secrets of the ruins of Anuradhapura would have remained as great a riddle as those of Stonehenge or the Rollright Stones. Although the reading of the Mahawanso did not present the same gigantic difficulties as the cuneiform inscriptions of Nineveh, it was yet a task of great difficulty. The records were kept by priests; they were written in Pali, the language of the Buddhist priesthood, imperfectly understood by themselves, but in diction so mystic and obscure that the ancient scribes found it necessary to write a commentary, or translation into the vulgar tongue of the dark original. This _tika_, as it was called, appears to have been lost until about the year 1826, when it was discovered among a collection of manuscripts which were given to Mr. Turnour by the high priest of Saffragam. Even the priests, lazy and ignorant, could make nothing of the precious legacy of their predecessors. Once he was possessed of the invaluable clue, Mr. Turnour’s task must have been comparatively lightened. Still it remained a great feat, thanks to which we are the richer by a human document of the highest interest. Sir James Emerson Tennent’s account of Mr. Turnour and his labours is well worth reading.

Strip the old Pali Poem of its monkish legends and fairy tales, and we have the authentic story of an ancient civilization, some five hundred years older than our own era. It is the tale of men who lived and loved and hated and fought; of men who bought and sold and were moved by the same greed of gain, the same passions, the same ambitions that move us to-day. Whatever their faults or their crimes may have been, all that they did was on a colossal scale. Their ideas were magnificent, heroic.

When in the sixth century before Christ, the great conqueror Wijayo came from India as a merchant and established his power in Ceylon, the first need was to assure the food supply of the island, which up to that time had been mainly dependent upon imported rice; food meant agriculture, and agriculture meant irrigation; hence those vast reservoirs in which the great crocodiles still lurk, basking lazily on the sunburnt rocks at Anuradhapura. Two hundred years later came the Apostle of Buddhism, Mahindo.

Tissa—Dewananpia Tissa—the beloved of the saints—was at that time king; he quickly became converted and begged Mahindo to pray Asoka, the famous King of Maghada, to bestow upon him a cutting of the sacred Bō tree (ficus religiosa) under which Prince Siddartha sat in the Mrigadeva, the deer forest near Benares, where he preached his first sermon after he had attained perfect wisdom. Asoka was willing, but there was a difficulty—the sacred tree must not be cut with a knife; so a miracle was required and the miracle came. With a vermilion pencil the king painted a circle round the chosen branchlet. Immediately heavenly music was heard, the wind raged and the thunder roared, the beasts of the forest howled, birds screamed, demons yelled, men shouted; the little branch detached itself and planted itself in a golden vase prepared by Mahindo’s sister, the holy Sanghamitta, when it happily took root and was transported with great solemnity and pomp to Ceylon, where with more miracles and divine manifestations of the elements, it was planted in that sacred enclosure in which it stands to this day. It is undoubtedly the oldest tree in the world for the planting of which the date can be fixed. For upwards of two thousand years there it has stood, the object of worship by pilgrims from all those countries where the memory of Buddha is held sacred. For all those centuries the same litanies have been recited before it, the perfume of the champak and other flowers, the offering beloved of Buddha, laid in the same patterns, has risen from its four altars.

Kings and High Priests, men mighty in many lands, have carried hither their sins and their penitence, praying for the mercy of a pure life and the attainment of that mysterious hereafter which men call Nirvana. And the sacred tree itself?—The wonderful tree before which throughout the ages millions upon millions of men have prostrated themselves in adoration? Not a majestic specimen as such trees go—indeed, it is undutifully dwarfed by its own descendants mounting guard over it in the various courtyards of the Temple. Yet there it stands in all its sanctity, just as it was described by the old Chinese pilgrim Fa Hsien, who saw it in the fourth century. The Temple, or, rather, perhaps I should say the enclosure, occupies about two or three acres. It is surrounded by an outer wall some twelve feet high. To the left and to the right of the entrance gate are two huge Bō trees, each with a palm-tree growing out of it, said to be emblems connected with primitive forms of nature worship. Some of the masonry is curious. The stones are laid upon their edges, lozenge-wise, and of these the alternate stones are omitted, leaving a series of lozenge-shaped niches blackened with the grease and smoke of ages, for on high days and holy days myriads of lamps are set a-burning in them.

Travelling makes us feel the narrow boundaries which have been set for the working of man’s brain. Wander over the face of the earth and you will find the same proverbs, the same fairy-tales, the same legends, the same ghosts, the same superstitions—even the same jokes. You will find the stories of Boccaccio and the “Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles” repeated in China and Japan. In all these cases the difference is only in the clothing in which local custom dresses them. So with religious offerings: we lay our roses and lilies and violets upon the altar; the Singhalese brings the champak; the idea is the same. Flowers and lamps! Like the vestal virgins, all men light fire in their sacred places.

Other relics were given by King Asoka. Dagobas were raised to contain these—colossal structures of solid brickwork with a tiny receptacle for the sacred treasure. So the new religion flourished greatly and the piety of successive kings founded great monasteries containing thousands of monks, little heeding that these comfortable homes were the negation of a rule as strict as that of St. Francis, which enjoined upon the yellow-robed shavelings no better dwelling than a “pansala,” a shelter of leaves.

Fancy and imagination are wonderful architects, but it is hard even for them to build up a semblance of the glories of Anuradhapura as they must have been in the days when the great Brazen Palace, of which the sixteen hundred jagged stone pillars still stand, upheld a colony of some two thousand monks in its nine stories: days when, scattered over the vast plain, buildings the magnificence of which is witnessed in the sculptured stones, seven-headed Nagas, and elaborately carved moonstones, huge half discs of granite decorated with processions of elephants, lions, horses and the sacred goose (hansa), and scroll-work that is almost Italian in feeling, rose at the bidding of an art which had reached its zenith when we were still in darkness. Gold, precious gems, and colours were used in profusion to adorn what is now the mere wreckage of a past barbaric grandeur, swallowed up in the riotous vegetation of the tropics. Fa Hsien bears eloquent witness to the wealth of flowers used in the worship at the temples, and the richness of the innumerable royal gardens is a matter of history.

As regards the authenticity of the Bō tree, Tennent argues well that it must be the identical tree and no substitute planted to replace one that had died. Had that tree, sacred throughout the East, died, its death could not have been concealed; the emotion created by the news would have been too deep. The story of the loss must have penetrated furthest Asia.

There is indeed much in the story of the ancient Buddhist Kings of Ceylon which calls up wonder and praise. They were great gentlemen. Here is a story of knightly virtue that is worth retailing. Two hundred years before our era Elala, a Malabar adventurer, invaded Ceylon, defeated and killed the reigning King Asela, and reigned for forty years over the island. At the end of that time Dutugaimunu, a prince of the old royal family, whose dream it had been from boyhood to exterminate the Malabars, raised an army against Elala and after prodigies of valour defeated and slew him. There his enmity ceased. Full of admiration for the dead usurper’s courage, and for the justice which he had shown during forty years—even though a Brahman, protecting the Buddhist priesthood—he erected a great monument on the spot where Elala died, and there it still stands a record of a true knight’s generosity. Moreover he issued a decree that even the Kings of Lanka should on nearing the monument silence the music of their processions and dismount from their litters, and this custom continued well into the nineteenth century, when the kings had long since disappeared. Could a Bayard have shown greater chivalry towards a dead enemy?

There are now probably more travellers who visit Anuradhapura than there were when I was there. As for the residents, there were men who had passed the best years of their lives in Ceylon and had barely heard of it. The old city was to them as are St. Paul’s Cathedral and the Tower of London to the average West End Londoner—something so near that there is no need to hurry to go and see it. For myself, I would gladly have spent weeks among the scattered ruins, and even have gone further afield to see and learn—but time pressed and we had to hie back.

I was loth to leave the wilds without obtaining a glimpse of the Veddahs, those primitive savages whom the Indian Conqueror, Wijayo, drove into the forests and rock caves which are still their lairs, just as Jimmu Tennō, perhaps a century earlier, had hunted the Ainus of Japan. There is no doubt that these are the lineal descendants of the ancient Yakkos described in the Mahawanso, of the truthfulness of which they are a living proof. The testimony is reciprocal. No wonder that the Brahmans in all their pride of race and high breeding should have looked upon these hideous and degraded savages as Demons. Perhaps nowhere on the face of this earth does there exist a more untamed race. They know no God and have no religion; a few guttural sounds, which are their only means of communication, can scarcely be called a language. Twelve arrows were once given to them to be distributed equally among four recipients. There was no man among their chiefs who was capable of so abstruse a calculation. Their food is of the filthiest, though they cook the flesh of the monkeys and giant lizards which are their most relished dainties—the former almost cannibalism. Their weapons are the bow and a sort of rude hatchet; their clothes as little as maybe; they have not to contend with cold, and decency is the least of their cares. In their persons they are appallingly ugly and repulsive. Their misshapen limbs are deformed, their mouths and teeth animal and revolting. Long and filthy matted black hair, and in the men beards, reach to their middle, falling in tangled strands. Such is the description given of them by Tennent and others. The picture of a race belonging to a prehistoric age, to a long since forgotten world. And yet in spite of all this, so great is the respect paid to pedigree by the Singhalese, ashamed of their mixed ancestry, that these degraded but pure-raced outcasts are looked upon as beings of a high caste, their very barbarism shrouding them in the glamour of eld.

How many of these poor wretches there may be cannot be reckoned with accuracy; among scattered tribes living in hiding-places no census is possible. In the opinion of an old and well-informed settler in Ceylon, they do not exceed two thousand—if indeed there are as many. It is not too much to say that the Veddahs are one of the greatest of human curiosities. It is difficult to think of a race living for twenty-five centuries unchanged, untouched by any vestige of progress, and that too, not cast away upon a desert island—not lost like Stanley’s pygmies in the baneful swamps of the dark African forest, but living cheek by jowl with five successive civilizations, the Brahman, the Buddhist, the Portuguese, the Dutch, and the British. It is difficult to believe that as time speeds on some measure of civilization will not at last penetrate even this survival of the unfittest.

Professor Tiele, the learned Dutch author of “The History of Religion,” says: “The statement that there are nations or tribes which possess no religion, rests either on inaccurate observation, or on a confusion of ideas. No tribe or nation has yet been met with destitute of belief in any higher beings; and travellers who asserted their existence have been afterwards refuted by the facts.” Ceylon is easily accessible and it would be interesting if some scientific investigator would tell the truth of what has been said of the Veddahs. That they should believe in no spirit, worship no fetish, seems incredible.

This was a delightful journey, with something of the charm of the olden time about it. We rode in our own carriage, such as it was; started at our own time, stopped where we pleased, and lingered by the way as our fancy might dictate. Nowadays—well, as Thackeray once put it, “We arrive at places, but we travel no more.”[47]

I am loth to bid farewell even to the memory of the beautiful island. Eight years later, in 1906, I was there again, but only on a flying visit, when Prince Arthur’s mission was on its way to Japan to invest the Mikado with the Order of the Garter. We had to make the most of the few hours which were allotted to us, but we managed to run up through dreamland to Kandy, to stand in wonder by the side of the beautiful lake. Through a motley crowd, in which the picturesque old-world dresses of the chieftains, the bright yellow robes and brown shaven pates of the Buddhist monks were conspicuous, we were taken to see the Temple of the Tooth and its sacred relic, which was to be shown in honour of a Royal Prince, but which no man but the ordained priest must touch. When the King of Siam visited the Temple, he wished to be allowed to hold the Tooth in his hand. But the priests would not hear of it. In vain he pleaded that in his youth he, too, had been ordained. No! said the priests; he had forsaken the priesthood and abjured his vows and it must not be. He insisted, but they were obdurate, and so in his misery, like the Israelites by the waters of Babylon, the King of Siam sat down and wept.

Once, as we were told, the priest-guardians of the Holy Tooth were outwitted. Between forty and fifty years ago there arrived from Siam a company of pious monks, bearing with them a vessel of their temple filled with holy water, into which it was their purpose to dip the sacred Tooth in order that they might carry back with them to their own country some of its mystic virtues. On arriving at Kandy, they were told that to obtain this favour would be no easy matter—indeed, that it would be well-nigh impossible. However, they made their wish known to one Tikiri Banda, a Singhalese of high caste and a man of authority, and he, not without due bribes, promised to make an agreement with the priests of the Temple in order that their wishes might be fulfilled. On a certain day they went to the Temple, bearing with them their sacred vessel of holy water. In the meantime it had become noised abroad that some desecration of the Tooth was contemplated; a crowd flocked into Kandy from the neighbouring villages, full of wrath lest this evil thing should be done: as at Ephesus when the holiness of the Temple of Diana was threatened, there was a mighty stir and great confusion. The priests were willing enough to show the Tooth to their brethren from Siam, but they were not willing that it should be touched or dipped in the water. So there arose a hot dispute, in which Tikiri Banda was attacked by both sides.

As it fell out, the Government agent happened to be passing that way, and being aware of a great commotion, went into the Temple to see what was amiss; recognizing Tikiri Banda, he called upon him to explain. “Sir,” said Tikiri Banda, “this is a small matter not worthy of your Excellency’s attention. These pious men do but wish to do thus in order that their country may have a share in the virtues of this holy relic of our Lord Buddha.” And fitting the action to his words, before the dumbfoundered and gaping priests of the Temple could stop him, he took the Tooth reverently between his fingers and dipped it in the bowl. The trick was done.

And that is how by this man’s cunning the priests of the Temple were discomfited and the priests from Siam having obtained their pious wish were able to carry back the blessed water to their own country, where no doubt it has performed many notable miracles and wonders.

The Tooth has often been described. It is of enormous size, and by heretics it is believed to be the tooth of an elephant. It must be remembered that according to monkish legend Buddha was of supernatural stature—one authority says that he was eighteen feet high; another thirty. A suitable tooth had to be found. Monasteries appear to be all over the world schools for the painting of lilies and the embroidery of fine gold.

Close to the Shrine of the Tooth there is another temple, which we were told was mixed Hindu and Buddhist. Only once in the year does a priest enter the sacred building; for the rest of the time its solitary tenant is a very old cobra, whom the priests feed with milk passed in under the door in a platter. When the priest goes in the snake retires into a corner, where he sits up, with his hood spread out, to watch the proceedings. Sheltered under the piety of his hosts, who may not take life, not even that of a poisonous snake, he is safe from all hurt. Now since cobras as is well known always live in pairs, as they came out of the Ark, this ancient snake on the contrary seems to have followed the monastic rule of celibacy appropriate to his holy domicile. Seeing that Buddhism was in its inception a revolution against Brahmanism, it seems incongruous, if true, that one sacred building should harbour the two religions. Hardly more incongruous, perhaps, than that a sacred Bō tree, a scion of the old tree of Anuradhapura, growing in the enclosure of the British church, and surrounded by two tiers of ornamental masonry, should be hung with rags and _ex votos_ by humble penitents. It is good to think of the generosity of a clergyman who can respect the heartfelt religion of those among whom he dwells, even though it be not his own.

It was sad to be obliged to rush away from Ceylon as soon as we had reached it. A mere glimpse of its loveliness was tantalizing, but the furthest East was calling, and we must obey the summons.

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