26 The Rifle and Hound in Ceylon. 



plains till so far from human habitations that the terri- 

 tories of beasts commence, he finds himself walled in 

 by jungle on either side of the highway. In vain he 

 asks for information. He finds the neighborhood of 

 Galle, his first landing-place, densely populated : he 

 gets into the coach for Colombo. Seventy miles of 

 close population and groves of cocoa-nut trees are 

 passed, and he reaches the capital. This is worse and 

 worse he has seen no signs of wild country during 

 his long journey, and Colombo appears to be the height 

 of civilization. He books his place for Kandy ; he 

 knows that is in the very centre of Ceylon there surely 

 must be sport there, he thinks. 



The morning gun fires from the Colombo fort at 5 

 A.M., and the coach starts. Miles are passed, and still 

 the country is thickly populated paddy cultivation in 

 all the flats and hollows, and even the sides of the hills 

 are carefully terraced out in a laborious system of agri- 

 cultui-e. There can be no shooting here ! 



Sixty miles are passed ; the top of the Kaduganava 

 Pass is reached, eighteen hundred feet above the sea 

 level, the road walled with jungle on either side. From 

 the summit of this pass our newly-arrived sportsman 

 gazes with despair. Far as the eye can reach over a 

 vast extent of country, mountain and valley, hill and 

 dale, without one open spot, are clothed alike in one 

 dark screen of impervious forest. 



He reaches Kandy, a civilized town surrounded b) 

 hills of jungle that interminable jungle ! and atKand^ 

 he may remain, or, better still, return again to England^ 

 unless he can get some, well-known Ceylon sportsman 

 to pilot him through the apparently pathless forests, and 

 in fact to " show him sport." This is not easily effected. 



