chap. I. CHARACTER OF THE COUNTRY. t? 



wild country during his long journey, and Colombo 

 appears to be the height of civilisation. 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 labori- 

 ous system of agriculture. There can be no shooting 

 here ! 



Sixty miles are passed ; the top of the Kadu- 

 ganava 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, moun- 

 tain and valley, hill and dale, without one open spot, 

 are clothed alike in one dark screen of impervious 

 forest. 



He reaches Kandy, a civilised town surrounded 

 by hills of jungle — that interminable jungle ! — and at 

 Kandy 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 path- 

 less forests, and in fact to ' show him sport.' This is 

 not easily effected. Men who understand the sport 



