XIX.] 
TEMPLES IN CEYLON. 
427 
persons standing round. At two of the priests’ houses there was 
a swarm of school-children, who ran busily about with their 
palm-leaf writing books and writing implements. 
The temples were very different in their arrangements, pro¬ 
bably on account of the dissimilar usages of the various Buddhist 
sects to which they belonged. A temple near Colombo contained 
a large number of wooden images and paintings of gods, or men 
of more than human size. Most of them stood upright like a 
guard round a sitting Buddha. I could not observe any dislike 
on the part of the priests to take the foreigner round their 
temples. The key, however, was sometimes wanting to some 
repository, whose contents they were perhaps unwilling to 
desecrate by showing them to the unbeliever. This was, for 
instance, the case with the press which contained the devil’s 
bow and arrows, in the temple at Batnapoora. The temple 
vessels besides were exceedingly ugly, tasteless, and ill-kept. I 
seldom saw anything that showed any sign of taste, art, and 
orderliness. How different from Japan, where all the swords, 
lacquer work, braziers, teacups, &c., kept in the better temples 
would deserve a place in some of the art museums of Europe. 
In the sketch of the first voyage from Novaya Zemlya to 
Ceylon, a countryman of Lidner can scarcely avoid giving a 
picture of “ Ceylon’s burned up vales.” In this respect the 
following extract from a letter from Dr. Almquist, sketching his 
journey to the interior of the island may be instructive :— 
“ Three hours after our arrival at Point de Galle I sat properly 
stowed away in the mail-coach m roide, for Colombo. As 
travelling companions I had a European and two Singhalese. 
As it was already pretty dusk in the evening there was not much 
of the surrounding landscape visible. We went on the whole 
night through a forest of tall coco-nut trees whose dark tops 
were visible far up in the air against the somewhat lighter sky. 
It was peculiar to see the number of fire-flies flying in every 
direction, and at every wing-stroke emiting a bright flash. The 
night air had the warm moistness which is so agreeable in the 
