Ceylon: July
A line of palm trees over a tumultuous fringe of silver foam, which leaps up on a dull opal-green sea, is your first impression as you get near the island. When you come into harbour, a quantity of narrow black boats swarm round the steamer. Then the tug comes alongside, and after waiting in it till it is no longer worth while to go on shore in a boat, I finally, in a burst of impatience, get into a boat and am rowed ashore. No sooner am I in the boat than the tug starts. However, the four black men in my boat pull hard and we reach the pier almost at the same time as the tug.
The first thing to do is to take a rickshaw. It is fine, but fortunately cloudy; the sun is hidden. In spite of this, it is hot, very hot. The streets are made of red sand, the houses of Venetian red stone. You pass palm trees, and trees which look like acacias, only they have mingled with the intense green of their foliage a quantity of scarlet flowers. I go scudding along the street to the Galleface Hotel. You pass babus in white European clothes, and frail black Cingalese dressed in diaphanous silks, and Anglo-Indians in pith helmets. The world of Kipling is revealed to one in a trice. A long drive along the sea leads to the hotel, This is the fashionable esplanade of Ceylon. Carriages pass up and down full of wealthy natives. The sea throws up a huge long wash of booming surf. The hotel is a large white building, like the section of an exhibition. The bedrooms are high wooden cubicles. As soon as you arrive a tailor springs from somewhere and asks you if you want any clothes—thin clothes—made in the night. I don’t think I do. As soon as I have got a room and disposed of my luggage, I take a rickshaw and drive through the native part of the town. It becomes more and more like Kipling. You pass little bullocks, and natives bathing and washing clothes in a pool; shops full of fruit; natives squatting, natives talking, natives smoking. You hear all manner of cries, and you smell the smell of the East.
I wander about until it is dark and then come back to dinner. The tailor appears again. I don’t want any clothes: but it is no use, one has to order them, so importunate is he. He measures me and promises to have the complete suit ready by the next morning at 6.30.
It is when you are dressed for dinner and you come down into the large high dining-room, full of electric fans, that you realize that it is impossible to be cool. It is an absorbing, annihilating damp heat that saps your very being.
The first thing to do is to eat a mango. Will it be as good as you are told it is? Yes, it is better. At first you think it is just an ordinary apricot, and then you think it is a banana; no, fresher; a peach, a strawberry, and then a delicious, sharp, fresh, aromatic after-taste comes, slightly tinged with turpentine, but not bitter. Then you get all the tastes at once, and you know that the mango is like nothing else but its own incomparable self.
It has all these different tastes at once, simultaneously. In this it resembles the beatific vision as told of by St. Thomas Aquinas. The point of the beatific vision, says St. Thomas, is its infinite variety. So that those who enjoy it have at the same time the feeling that they are looking at a perfect landscape, hearing the sweetest music, bathing in a cold stream on a hot day, reaching the top of a mountain, galloping on grass on a horse that isn’t running away, floating over tree-tops in a balloon, reading very good verse, eating toasted cheese, drinking a really good cocktail—and any other nice thing you can think of, all at once. The point, therefore, of the taste of the mango is its infinite variety. It was probably mangoes which grew in Eden on the Tree of Knowledge, only I expect they had a different kind of skin then, and were without that cumbersome and obstinate kernel, which makes them so very difficult to eat.
There are a good many people at dinner—Englishmen and Englishwomen. Their faces are washed absolutely chalk-white by the heat, as if every drop of blood had been drained from them. That is what comes from living in such a climate. One thinks of Kipling once more. The room seems to be full of his characters. There is Mrs. Hawksbee; I recognised her at once. There is Otis Yeere and Pluffles, and Churton and Reggie Burke, and Pack, and I believe that conjuror in the verandah is Strickland in disguise. He comes nearer and does the mango trick, and then begins to charm a snake; but we all refuse to see the snake charmed, charm he never so wisely, having a horror of snakes.
It gets hotter and hotter; one feels one’s bones melting.
The next morning punctually at 6.30 the tailor arrives with the suit of clothes finished, as he promised, and by eight we have to be on board the steamer.
To-day the sun is shining with all his might, and one realizes that if one had stayed a few hours longer in this beautiful island, it would have entailed either buying a pith helmet or getting a sunstroke.
The harbour is a lovely sight in the early morning. Church parties from a British man-of-war are on their way to church. The sea is like an emerald to-day. The little narrow native boats, full of gorgeous-coloured fruits, are slipping about round the liner. I am sorry to leave Ceylon.