The road turns and sweeps into the palm forest. Innumerable slender, silver-gray columns soar to an astonishing height – a hundred feet or more – bearing at the top a wide feathery crown where the big globes of the coconuts hang, green and gold.
A profound green twilight reigns here, with something, I know not what, of holy sadness and awe amid these silent gray aisles – delicate, lofty, still. My own heart feels heavy. Perhaps I am tired. Or homesick. Likely I am both. I feel I am missing out on parties at home and wonder what book the literary society has chosen to read next. Is Charles Wetmore attending? Has Molly gotten any of my postcards yet?
Our guide, a brown lad of ten, stands on the carriage step clinging to the door, and chatters fluently in tangled and intricate English, of which he is obviously inordinately vain.
“Everyone out. Must walk here,” he says.
The garden lies between two very lofty cone-shaped peaks and is as well kept and full of tropical blossoms and verdure as are all the others we have seen.
“Miss Bisland, Miss Bisland. Look here!” The boy stops to show me tiny fronds of a sensitive-plant that shudder away from his rude little finger with a voluntary movement startling to see in a plant.
“What makes them do that?”
The boy shrugs. No one knows the answer. But the curiosity is enough to reawaken my sense of adventure and lift the melancholy. I poke at the plant and laugh when it shies away.
We hear the rushing speech of waters calling loudly in the hills, but see nothing save the mountain's garments of opulent verdure. A path zigzags sharply upward through the trees and vine labyrinth, and by this the boy leads the way with the speed and agility of a goat. We pant along in his wake, barely keeping him in sight.
“Is he trying to kill us?” questions Mrs. Kelly, dressed in an outfit meant for sunning on a deck chair. She waves her fan desperately, trying to cool her brow.
The atmosphere is a steam bath, and the moisture pours down our faces as we spring from stone to stone and corkscrew back and forth, deafened by the vociferations of the fall, but catching no glimpse of it.
“Do you want to rest here?” Robert asks. The son has decided he is bored on ship and wanted an excursion. “We can fetch you when we return.”
“I’ll make it,” she says with surprising determination in her voice. “I’ve come this far.”
Exhausted, gasping, streaming with perspiration, we finally emerge upon a plateau high on the peak's side and are suddenly laved in that warm wind that stirred the palm fronds.
At our feet is a wide, quivering green pool, crossed by a frail bridge; from far above leaps down to us a flood of glittering silver that dashes the emerald pool into powdery foam, races away under the bridge, and springs again with a shout into the thickets below. We lose sight of it amid the leaves, but can hear its voice as it leaps from ledge to ledge down to the valley and is silenced at last in the river.
A tiny shrine built here at the side of this first pool is tended by a thin melancholy-eyed young priest, who lives alone at this great height, his only companions the ceaseless din of the waters and the little black elephant-headed god in the shrine. He bears a spot of dried clay upon his forehead – a token of humility or submission.
“In morning he prays. Puts hand in water. Hand in dust. Hand on forehead,” says our guide, miming the act of devotion. “Wash off at night.”
I lay a piece of money upon the altar, and in return the priest gives me a handful of pale, perfumed pink bells that grow upon the mountainside, and are the only sacrifice offered to the little black god. He motions for me to remove my hat and decorate my hair with the flowers in the fashion in which his countrywomen wear them.
I do so, and he smiles.
Back again through the steaming woods and the palm aisles, then the ship once more, and our faces are turned towards Ceylon.
IT IS A FIVE days' run from Penang to the island of Ceylon; the ship's company has dwindled to a handful, and time hangs heavily upon us. We are reduced, for lack of other occupations, to an undue interest in the ship's menagerie.
The fifth officer has a monkey – a surreptitious monkey, not allowed to members of the staff – and at such time as the stern seniors are on duty we amuse ourselves fearfully and secretly with his antics as we placate him with raisins.
“You should get one,” he tells me. “Your friends in America would want to see it.”
“Never.” Imagine Molly’s shock if I were to bring home a monkey!
At other times, while the powers that be look on, the Fifth and I sport ostentatiously with two gorgeous and permissible cockatoos which we find, like most things permissible, dull and uninteresting.
The consul to Bangkok – a slim, brown gentleman with a soft, languid voice and tiny feet – is carrying home a family of Siamese cats; white, with tawny legs and fierce blue eyes; uncanny beasts with tigerish ways. They live in the fo'castle in company with an impulsive Chinese puppy of slobberingly affectionate disposition; and their prowling, long-legged behavior gets upon his nerves most terribly. He is too manly a little person to hurt them, and his only refuge is an elaborate pretense of not seeing; even when they rub against his nose, he gazes abstractedly off into space and firmly refuses to be aware of their existence.
The doctor has two families of felines. One is a respectable tortoise-shell British matron, absorbed with the cares of a profuse maternity. She has five tiny kittens nestled in beside her. I kneel next to her box and tell her what a wonderful mother she is.
The doctor scoops up a kitten and hands it to me. Its legs splay wild until his claws catch onto my skirts. I can feel it quivering beneath my hand as I stroke it.
“Born last week,” says the doctor with pride as if he had anything to do with it. “Now, there is another cat around her somewhere. Chibbley!” he calls. “Since the kittens, she’s having fits of jealousy. If I dare to caress her without having previously washed my hands after touching the kittens, she flies into a fury, claws, spits, rages, and finally rushes up into the rigging to sulk.”
I picture a pouting cat up high in the sails, pitching and rolling during a storm. “How do you get her down?”
“I grovel with a seductive bowl of dinner in my hands.”
As if to prove the point, Chibbley appears and rubs against the doctor’s leg, eying both me and the kitten. She is a splendid Persian lady, despite being madly jealous of the division in her owner's affections.
“Beautiful creature, isn’t she?” says the doctor, stroking her with a firm hand that brings out a deep purr. “I bought her from a native on the wharves at Bombay. She was in a frightful condition. Wild with starvation and bad treatment. She had been stolen from some zenana – the inner apartments of the women. I knew it because she smelled of violet powder and had a gold thread around her neck, but I couldn’t let her go back to that mistreatment. She has not, however, forgotten the ways of her mistress, and is greedy, luxurious, indolent, and bad-tempered.”
WE SAIL INTO Ceylon’s harbor by the light of great tropical stars, and the planet gleams of a light shining from the tall clock tower of Colombo. Already many ships lie in the narrow roadstead, and it requires the fine art of navigation to slip our boat's huge bulk into her berth between two of these and make her fast to her own particular buoy.
The pilot comes aboard just outside, and it is his firm hand that jams her nose up to within three hairs' breadth of the vessel in front, holds her there with a grip of iron, and with cautious screw-revolutions swings her into line with her heels in the very face of the Australian mail-ship – arrived a few hours earlier.
Then the entire passenger list – on deck for the last half-hour, aiding the pilot by holding its breath – sighs relievedly and joyously, and goes below in a body to recuperate on brandy and soda.
I am amazed at the skill of some men, daring enough to take on a mechanical challenge and see it through. Although in the case of Cyclone Bill Downing, I did feel my life was in his hands on seve
ral occasions instead of the Almighty’s.
I linger a moment in the darkness to smell the fragrance of the night, moved by the vast flowings of a warm sweet wind. Seafarers of other days told of these perfumes of the Spice Island filling their sails far out at sea, but the coal smoke of the modern ship deadens the nostril of the modern traveler and fills his heart with naughty doubts of the veracity of the Ancient Mariner.
Nonetheless, there are in the mountain forests of Ceylon strange, treeless, lake-like expanses of aromatic lemon grass from which the winds come heavy with intoxicating scents. I fancy I can detect faint delicious savors in the air, and that night – sleeping with open portholes – I dream of perfumes.
I am up early to have the first possible view of an island so like to Paradise that I am told Adam was first banished to this place that he might not feel too sharply in the beginning his loss and the contrast.
Upon Adam's Peak – a soaring pinnacle seven thousand feet high, of which we caught a glimpse yesterday while still far at sea – stood the father of men and wept his lost Eden, for which even Ceylon might not console him; the bitter rain of this immeasurable grief trickling down the mountainside into the rocks, the rivers, the sea, and the sands, where it is found today as clear shining gems and pearls like tears.
It was upon this peak that, having clothed himself in the skins of beasts, he shred abroad to the winds the first green garments that hid his primal nakedness, and these, scattered far and wide by the breeze, sprang up in spice plants – so ambrosial a potency had even the leaves of the trees in Paradise.
In the morning light this island of jewels, of flowers, and palms look like the long-lost heavenly gardens. It floats upon smooth, lustrous waters, under a sky of pale warm violet, veiled in a dawn-mist faint and mysterious as dreams. Beyond the massive breakwater of our straitened harbor, curve the rims of white beaches frilled with foam, where palms lean over to look at themselves in a sea of green mother-of-pearl.
It is very hot. The thermometer even at this hour (it is the last day of December) registers 80°; but it is less oppressive than at Singapore, where one seemed to be breathing tepid water rather than air.
A long wharf juts out into the harbor with a customhouse at its landward end. We pause here to exchange some civilities concerning the weather, and pass on with our luggage unmolested, so soothing and plentiful a lack of curiosity have these officials in British ports.
The soil is red – bright red – the color of ground cinnabar. Not “liver-colored,” as the earth seemed to the ancient Northmen, but deep-tinted as if soaked with dragon's blood, of which antiquity believed cinnabar to be made.
A broad street, fringed with grass and tulip trees, goes inland, and on either side are massive white buildings with arched and pillared arcades. The vividness of color here is astounding – brilliant, intense, like the colors of precious stones.
“Do my eyes deceive me?” questioned the lady from Boston. “Miss Bisland, can the earth be so red, the sea and sky so blue?”
“It is a miracle wrought by the luminosity of the Eastern day,” I respond. “One's very flesh tingles with an ecstasy of pleasure in this giant effulgence of color, as might a musician's who should hear the vibrations of some colossal harp.”
“Yes, one could feel that,” she replies hesitantly.
I laugh and loop my arm through hers. She is growing used to my ebullient ways as I am to her understated ones. I can’t help that language is my tool and that finding the exact word gives me a thrill.
The Grand Oriental Hotel lies to the right of this road, near the water – big and glaringly white without, cool and shadowy within. Ships from India, China, and Australia have just arrived, and the place is crowded.
The clack of many heels rings on the stone floor of the arcade, which opens upon an inner flowery court, where also look out the windows of the sleeping-rooms above, veiled by delicate transparent straw mattings – waving softly in and out in the little hot breezes, giving treacherous glimpses now and again of a pretty disheveled head and tumbled white draperies.
The arcade is full of British folk – Australians and Anglo-Indians, passing to and fro to the dining room, to the stairs, to the front entrance. Handsome, as an Anglo-Saxon crowd of the well-to-do is apt to be – tall, florid men in crisp white linen and white Indian helmets; tall, slim, well-poised girls in white muslin, with a delicious fruit-like pink in their cheeks, brought there by the heat, which curls their blond hair in damp rings about their brows and white necks. And tall, imposing British matrons, with something of the haughtiness of old Rome in their bearing – the mothers and wives of conquerors.
Our rooms are at the end of a long corridor, looking on the street. They are carpetless and uncurtained, their dim twilight being sifted from the burning glare without through green mattings hung at the windows.
Before my door sits my own particular servant, detailed to wait upon this bedroom. Similar servants are stationed along the corridor in front of their respective charges. A curious creature – of a sex not easily to be determined. Mild-browed and woman-eyed, with long, rippling black hair knotted at the back and kept smooth with a tortoise-shell band comb, the brown femininities of his face disappear at the chin in a short close-curled black beard. He is full-chested as a budding girl, but clothes himself to the waist in shirt, coat, and waistcoat, the slender male hips being wrapped in a white skirt that falls to the ankles.
He is, however, an eminently agreeable person. He not only executes orders with noiseless dispatch, but receives them with a little reverence of the slim fingers to the brow, and a look in his lustrous eyes of such sweet eagerness to serve that my heart is melted within me.
He tells me it is the sacred and beautiful hour of tiffin. The time when knowledgeable companions point out who is who and what the important people are doing.
The dining room is as white, cool, and nobly plain as a Greek temple; long and very lofty – reaching to the roof – the second story opening upon it in an arched and balustraded clerestory to let in the light. Two punkahs of gold-colored stuff wave above us. On one side we look upon the arcaded court, and through the heavy-arched veranda upon the hot gorgeousness of color outside.
Bowls of tropical flowers are set on each table, and under the salt-cellars and spoons at the corners are laid large leaves of curious lace-like pattern, freaked with splashes of red and yellow.
More of the fawn-eyed men with long hair serve us, and the assemblage gathered here for the moment is a remarkable one. Near the door sits a good-looking young man, accompanying a party of blond girls in smart frocks. It is Wordsworth's grandson, and the owner of Rydal Mount.
At the table next to him is a stern, lean soldier with a melancholy face – the Lord Chelmsford in whose African campaign the Prince Imperial was killed and the English suffered a hideous butchery, surprised by the savages.
On the other side of the room is a young man with a heavy blond countenance – Dom Leopoldo Agostino and half a dozen things more, who has just met here, in his voyage round the world in a Brazilian war-ship, the news of his grandfather Dom Pedro's dethronement and exile. The captain of the ship dares not continue the cruise in the face of peremptory cables from the new government, and the young man is suddenly marooned here, with all his luggage and attendants, under the protection of the British lion, who has always a friendly paw for les rois en exil.
Near us is a man with a bulging forehead and a badly-fitting frock-coat of black broadcloth – a noted mesmerist from America, with a little Texan wife fantastically gowned; she, poor soul, having a picturesque instinct, but no technique.
Beyond him is a man of middle age, with a serious countenance, lean and bold as the head of Caesar, and an air of great distinction. It is Sir William Robinson, an Irishman, a well-known composer, and a colonial governor. Beside him sits Sir Henry Wrenfordsly, a colonial chief-justice. At their table is Lady Broome, a tall, handsome woman with a noble outline of brow and head. Under the title of La
dy Barker, she is the author of many well-known and delightful books on life in the Antipodes. Sir Napier Broome is also tall and handsome, and is on his way home from an Australian governorship.
“I should like to meet her,” I tell our informant, hoping he knows her, not merely of her.
After tiffin, he introduces us. Mrs. Kelly has gone back to her room for a nap, and so Lady Barker and I walk together and get acquainted. I freely tell her all about my trip, so easy she is to talk to.
“What a delight you are,” she says. “You would fit in nicely with our society. You know, my husband was a reporter, too. He still writes a little now and then.”
“Does he? I should like to visit you in England. There are so many sites I wish to see, but won’t have the least bit of time this trip.”
“You must come! Rudyard would love you.”
“Kipling? You are acquainted with Rudyard Kipling?”
She smiles slightly, knowing she has impressed me. “Yes, yes. There are several literary talents in our circles.” She thinks a moment before continuing. “Herbert Spencer, of course, and I must introduce you to Rhoda Broughton. I think you two will hit it off splendidly.”
In the arcade that faces on the street are native shops – tiny cells full of basket-work, wrought brass, laces, jewels; carvings in ivory, ebony, and tortoise-shell; India shawls and silks, Cingalese silver-work, and such small trinkets and souvenirs best calculated to lure the shy rupee from its lair in the traveler’s pocket.
Most of these shops are kept by Moormen – large persons in freckled calico petticoats, heads shaven quite clean and covered with a little red basket too small for the purpose. They inspire annoying disgust and suspicion by their craven oiliness; their wares for the most part not worth a tenth of the sums asked.
Jewels are to be had at astonishing rates – cat's-eyes and moonstones being sold carelessly by the handful. The arcade is full of itinerant merchants who carry their stock of precious stones – sometimes quite valuable – tied up in a dingy rag, disposing of them by methods of barter quite unique.
Liz and Nellie Page 23