ADAM'S SECOND EDEN 
107 
creamy white lines over the bright yellow 
sands — up to the bright red road and the 
intense green grass. 
Every ship stops for a day at Colombo 
for coal and water, mails, and fresh 
stores ; and all the earth — from East and 
West, from the Indian mainland and 
from the antipodes — meet at these two 
great hotels for midday curry and after- 
noon tea. All British folk know these 
two inns by their initial letters only, and 
in hot countries no Briton exerts himself 
to their full syllables, using a shorthand 
language for all such proper names and 
titles throughout "the gorgeous East." 
Deep, dark-eyed Sinhalese boys be- 
seech one to buy picture post-cards, old 
postage stamps, and match-box labels ; 
and bearded Sinhalese in tight petti- 
coats and white jackets, a child's round 
comb set backwards on their heads, like 
a reversed coronet, offer pillow-laces and 
"chicken-work" muslins, and pass trade 
messages to dark-eyed women in decol- 
lete white waists, with strings and strings 
of bead necklaces on their plump brown 
necks. 
The Moorman, the Jew, the Arabo- 
Armenian. the Malay, the Hindu, and 
the Sinhalese jewel merchants and their 
touts beset and bewilder one with their 
insistence. "Please come my shop." 
"Please buy my shop." "Please see great 
sapphire." "I show you big emerald." 
"Buy the Ceylon moonstone, lady." 
"Mine are bluer than his, lady," says 
No. 6. "I only have the best stones in 
Ceylon," says No. 7. "Mine only have 
the trueness blueness," says No'. 8. 
"Please buy ; I am poor man, lady," says 
another, making pantomime of convey- 
ing rice grains to his mouth with his fin- 
gers. 
If the victim escapes the besiegers on 
the veranda, he only runs into the al- 
coves of shops further down the hotel 
fronts, or the blocks of Indian, Bur- 
mese, Chinese, and Japanese shops in the 
blocks beyond. Every day he sees the 
tourist of simple faith tempted ; sees him 
haggle and struggle and buy, without 
test or guarantee or any knowledge of 
his own, rubies and sapphires, cat's- 
eyes, alexandrites, and emeralds. In time 
the victim learns that their value is ex- 
actly that of cut glass. 
If he sits at ease for a moment, snake 
charmers squat before him and produce 
their pets like hanks of yarn from such 
little round sewing-baskets as our grand- 
mothers used, and soon rows of hooded 
cobras sit up and wave their heads to the 
squeaky bagpipe airs of their charmers. 
A slim boy doubles himself into a bas- 
ket, ducks his head, and the lid is made 
fast with ropes and the elders thrust 
swords through and through the basket. 
The lid is lifted and the boy emerges 
smiling, while the next juggler plants a 
mango seed under a bit of cloth, and, 
when it has grown and pushed the cover 
high from the ground, one sees the plant 
with thick rustling leaves still mounting 
before one's eyes as the grower carefully 
caresses it. 
The native town of long" hot streets^ 
with noisy tram cars, lined with untidy,, 
cnce-white, near-white houses, frescoed 
with betel-juice stains, is not picturesque ; 
and for interesting drives one goes to the 
old Cinnamon Gardens and the new park, 
with its great banyan tree (see page 142), 
and sees the treasures of ancient art, the 
jewels, and the weapons at the museum. 
He drives or takes train for seven miles 
along shore to Mt. Lavinia, once the 
marine villa of the governors, then the 
home of Arabi Pasha, the Egyptian po- 
litical prisoner, and now a favorite hotel. 
In leafy suburbs there are dazzling 
white dagobas, or reliquaries, and flower- 
scented temples, where the Buddhist 
priests wear the same yellow robes, with 
bared shoulder, and teach the same pure 
tenets as when Asoka, the Indian Em- 
peror, sent his son and daughter as mis- 
sionaries to convert the island people. 
Priests come from other Buddhist coun- 
tries to study the southern version of 
the creed at the Oriental College in Co- 
lombo. 
In the early days of Portuguese and 
Dutch trade only the ports of Colombo, 
Galle, Jaffna, Trincomalee, and Batta- 
coloa were known to Europeans, the fierce 
Sinhalese chiefs holding the hill country 
against all invasion. When the English 
drove the Dutch out, in 1796, they soon 
