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The octagonal tower over the lake, familiar to all visitors to Kandy, contains the finest Buddhist theological library in the world. The books are all in manuscript, each one encased in a lacquer box, though the bookcases themselves containing these treasures were supplied by a well-known firm in the Tottenham Court Road.
At no place are these lovely insects more numerous and resplendent than at Kandy in Ceylon. Myriads of them flit about in the cool evening atmosphere, giving the appearance of countless meteors darting in different directions across the sky. In the clear Cotswold atmosphere very brilliant meteors are observable at certain seasons of the year.
About eight or nine miles from Kandy on the road towards Colombo, at the village of Angunawela, is an old Buddhist temple, which stands on the summit of an almost perpendicular rock. This edifice is in excellent preservation, and is a fine specimen of Kandian temple architecture. One is well paid for a visit to Angunawela and its local attractions. Ceylon the Mecca of Buddhism.
Whether the claim that it is the finest in the world be correct would require an expert to determine. The botanical garden at Demerara may be as good, if not larger and better. A layman visiting Peradeniya returns to Kandy in a state of bewilderment. He has seen so many attractive and strange manifestations of nature that lucid description is beyond his power.
There was not much time to spare, and we therefore had to pay sovereigns for our tickets instead of changing them for rupees, thereby receiving only ten instead of eleven and a half, the current rate of exchange that day. The line to Kandy is always described as one of the most beautiful railways in the world, and it certainly deserves the character.
Amongst others invited to see the Devil Dancers was a French traveller, a M. Des Etangs, a singularly cultivated man, who had just made a tour of all the French possessions in India. M. Des Etangs was full of curiosity about the so-called "Sacred Tooth" of Buddha, which is enshrined in the "Temple of the Tooth," and makes Kandy a peculiarly sacred place to the Buddhist world.
"She died, no doubt?" he asked; and the duenna assured him that they did not bury the living in Kandy, only the dead. But Sancho thought it was a very stupid thing for the Old Queen to go and die thus; he said he could see no reason why she should have taken the whole thing so to heart, for the Princess might have married a page.
The material prosperity of Ceylon is due to tea and rubber, and the admirable Public Works of the colony, roads, bridges and railways, seem to indicate that these two commodities produce a satisfactory budget. During the Kandy cricket week young planters trooped into the place by hundreds.
When travelling between Kandy and Newera Ellia, I was the guest of coffee-planters, all of them, so far as I remember, my own countrymen; and saw coffee in all its stages, from the berry on the coffee-bush on to the manufactured article ready for the market. The plant is indigenous in the island, but it was turned to little account till taken up by Europeans.
The weeping duenna went on to tell how she had been the ranking duenna at the court of the dowager-queen of Kandy; how she had been entrusted with the care and the bringing up of the Princess Antonomasia, the young heiress of the kingdom, and how she had permitted a young gentleman at the court, who was enamored of the Princess, to gain her favor in such a degree that marriage followed.
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