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The sight that unfailingly attracts most attention is situated, 

 perhaps, about mid-way in the defile. Here, supported on a lime- 

 stone pedestal, whose precipitous drop cannot be under 150 feet, 

 rises, at a single leap some 600 feet from the base, what appears 

 the half of a great mountain, whose smooth, bare, shining face, polish- 

 ed by atmospheric influence and repeated washings of the river, 

 affording no footing to plant life, other than Cryptogams, or 

 slender creepers, whose habit of life have taught them to delight in 

 such escalading, overhangs the silent stream threatening each 

 passing traveller with instant destruction. 



This picture is rendered still more romantic by the little pago- 

 da, which stands on the very brink of the pedestal, embowered in a 

 mass of rich green foliage, as though it had been built by some 

 genii-architect as the watch-tower of a guardian angel. 



" Not vainly did the early Persian make 

 His Altar the high places and the peak 

 Of earth — o'er gazing mountains, and thus take 

 A fit and unwall'd temple there to seek, 

 The spirit, in whose honour shrines are weak, 

 Uprear'd of Human Hands, come and compare 

 Columus and idol-dwellings, Goth or Greek 

 With nature's realms of worship, earth and air, 

 Nor fix on fond abodes to circuniscribe thy prayer ! 



Byron. 



131. The only animals we saw were some fine specimens of 



. domestic buffaloes, whose forest life 



had, however, evidently reduced them 

 to a wild state, and two varieties of monkeys ; the light coloured 

 Gibbon, whose wailing cries take the full compass of an octave, and 

 warned us of his existence in the wood long ere we saw him, and the 

 fisher monkey (Muos cercopetheeas.) an uninteresting brute in com- 

 parison with the rest of his family; excepting when after sport, and 

 then it is indeed amusing to witness the caution he displays in 

 handling a crab, or moving a stone in search of one. These brutes 

 were generally seen in large numbers around the fishermen's houses. 



132. Here the fish are caught in nets similiar to those seen at 

 Manner in which fish are here Ostend, on the Malabar coast, and at 



caught. Ceylon, though, of course, of a more 



primitive type. Two bamboo bows, of perhaps, fifteen feet, are 

 placed across one another at right angles, and to each end is attached 

 a corner of a net sufficiently large to form a good deep hollow ; a 

 bamboo of sufficient length to extend some distance over the water, 

 is then lashed to a tree and supported by a bracket from below. 

 To the end of this pole, the net is suspended by a long rope, and 

 so let down or pulled up at convenience. The net is weighted by 

 few pieces of rock thrown into it. 



