REVIEWS — NATURAL HISTORY OF CEYLON. 351 



" Komegalle, or Kurunai-galle, was one of the ancient capitals of the island, 

 and the residence ©f its kings from a.d. 1319 to 1347. The dwelling-house of 

 the principal civil officer in charge of the district now occupies the site of the 

 former palace, and the ground is strewn with fragments of columns and carved 

 stones, the remnants of the royal buildings. The modern town consists of the 

 bungalows of the European officials, each surrounded with its own garden ; two 

 or three streets inhabited by Dutch descendants and by Moors ; and a native 

 bazaar, with the ordinary array of rice and curry stuff, and cooking chattees of 

 brass or burnt clay. 



" The charm of the village is the unusual beauty of its position. It rests 

 within the shade of an enormous rock of gneiss upwards of 600 feet in height, 

 nearly denuded of verdure, and so rounded and worn by time that it has ac- 

 quired the form of a couchant elephant, from which it derives its name of Aeta- 

 galla, the Rock of the Tusker. But Aetagalla is only the last eminence in a 

 range of similarly-formed rocky mountains, which here terminate abruptly ; 

 and which, from the fantastic shapes into which their gigantic outlines have 

 been wrought by the action of the atmosphere, are called by the names of the 

 Tortoise Rock, the Eel Rock, and the Rock of the Tusked Elephant. So im- 

 pressed are the Singhalese by the aspect of these stupendous masses, that in 

 ancient grants lands are conveyed in perpetuity, or ' so long as the sun and 

 the moon, so long as Aetagalla and Andagalla shall endure.' 



" Kornegalle is the resort of Buddhists from the remotest parts of the island, 

 who come to visit an ancient temple on the summit of the great rock, to which 

 access is had from the valley below by means of steep paths and steps hewn out 

 of the solid stone. Here the chief object of veneration is a copy of the sacred 

 footstep hollowed in the granite, similar to that which confers sanctity on 

 Adam's Peak, the towering apex of which, about forty miles distant, the pilgrims 

 can discern from Aetagalla. 



" At times the heat at Kornegalle is intense, in consequence of the perpetual 

 glow diffused from these granite cliffs. The warmth they acquire during the 

 blaze of noon becomes almost intolerable towards evening, and the sultry night 

 is too short to permit them to cool between the setting and the rising of the sun. 

 The district is also liable to occasional droughts, when the watercourses fail and 

 the tanks are dried up. One of these calamities occurred about the period of 

 my visit, and such were the sufferings of the wild animals that numbers of croco- 

 diles and bears made their way into the town to drink at the wells. The soil is 

 prolific in the extreme ; rice, cotton, and dry grain are cultivated largely in the 

 valley. Every cottage is surrounded by gardens of cocoa-nuts, arecas, jak-fruit, 

 and coffee ; the slopes, under tillage, are covered with luxuriant vegetation, and 

 as far as the eye can reach on every side, there are dense forests intersected by 

 streams, in the shade of which the deer and the elephant abound. 



" In 1847, arrangements were made for one of the great elephant hunts for the 

 supply of the Civil Engineer's Department, and the spot fixed on by Mr. Morris, 

 the government officer who conducted the corral, was on the banks of the 

 Kimbul river, about fifteen miles from Kornegalle. The country over which 

 we rode to the scene of the approaching capture showed traces of the recent 



