AN ITINERARY OF THE VEDDA COUNTRY. 165 



Our next camp was formed at Kotalinda in the Eastern Province, 

 beyond Namal-oya. On our way there we met a community of 

 gypsies. These folk travel with large herds of cattle and goats, and 

 appear to subsist by doing a trade in these, and by begging, snake- 

 charming, thieving, and blackmailing. Their camp consisted of a 

 number of scattered shelters, more or less circular in outline and 

 formed of leaves of the talipot palm. Many of the men have medium 

 bro-wTi or hazel coloured eyes and are very good-looking, some having 

 distinctly aquiline noses. The women, who are less good-looking, 

 would pass as Tamils, but were immediately differentiated from all 

 the Tamil women we had seen by the masses of ornaments they 

 wore, many of them being literally covered with bangles and neck- 

 laces, the former made of silver, brass, and some silver-like alloy, 

 and the necklaces composed of glass or shell beads. They were said 

 to speak a dialect of Telegu, and they told us that their ancestors 

 had come from the neighbourhood of Madras, though the members 

 of the community we saw had all been born in Ceylon. They say 

 they worship and dance the god at Kataragam, whom they call 

 Telnoth, identifying him with the Tamil's Kanda Sdmi. The fore- 

 arms of the majority of the women were tattooed, the patterns 

 looking as though they might have been flower derivatives ; there 

 were also small tattoo marks on the foreheads and temples of most 

 of the women. 



We were detained in the neighbourhood of Kotalinda for some 

 days, partly owing to wet weather, but more to the determination 

 of the villagers to assist us as Uttle and as slowly as possible in clear- 

 ing away the trees that had fallen across the track during the cyclone 

 of the year before, so that they might make us believe that there 

 was a great deal to do and be paid accordingly. It was not till a 

 week after we had left Namal-oya that we reached Bandaraduwa, 

 where there was a large Sinhalese chena settlement with two Vedda 

 houses on it. These Bandaraduwa folk and a few scattered families 

 living in the neighbourhood are all that remain of the KovU Vana- 

 mai Veddas, a group of whom we had heard a good deal, and who 

 twenty years ago appear to have been veiy much in the condition 

 of the present Henebedda Veddas, that is to say, a community 

 making rough chenas and building good chena huts, but still passing 

 part of their time in caves and hving to a certain extent on game 

 and honey. It was, however, immediately clear that these Veddas 

 had much foreign blood in their veins, for all the men were over five 

 feet high. 



The day after our arrival a Vedda called Kaira came to our camp 

 sobbing and shaking, and protested that he could not stay with us 

 as his brother was dead. He seemed deeply affected, though an- 

 other brother, Kaurala, who was with him, appeared quite calm, 

 which led us to suspect that his uncontrollable agitation was due 

 to something more than mere affection for the dead man, and we 

 soon discovered that his brother had died in his hut, and it was 



