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This is the more surprising because of the general promptness of the English government in liberally furnishing all possible marine improvements to her distant colonies. The town is finely situated, crowning a steep, narrow, and rocky promontory, on a bay opening to the south. The name Galle means, in Singhalese, "a rock."
The Alaska Indians are not more surely dying out than are these Singhalese. The most sensitive matter with them and with nearly all orientals is touching the sacredness of their religious rites. With these the English government never interferes, neither here nor in India proper.
This story serves to corroborate the narrative of Mr. The Singhalese believe that the crocodile can only move swiftly on sand or smooth clay, its feet being too tender to tread firmly on hard or stony ground. In the dry season, when the watercourses begin to fail and the tanks become exhausted, the marsh-crocodiles have occasionally been encountered in the jungle, wandering in search of water.
This is the reason why nobody ever sees a dead monkey, any more, as the Singhalese proverb says, than a white crow or a straight cocoa-nut tree. A curious vegetable product was brought on board to-day, it being to all appearance a finely-made Havana cigar. The fibre is woody, covered with a smooth bark, and the colour of dark tobacco.
We were told that during the rains of the monsoons the water has been known to rise 60 feet in its bed, carrying carcasses of elephants and huge trees in its current. By the side of the road were numerous shops or bazaars, kept by low country Singhalese, for the sale of all sorts of commodities to the country people.
The Singhalese believe the polonga to be by far the most savage and wanton of the two, and they illustrate this by a popular legend, that once upon a time a child, in the absence of its mother, was playing beside a tub of water, which a cobra, impelled by thirst during a long-continued drought, approached to drink, the unconscious child all the while striking it with its hands to prevent the intrusion.
They had not full lips or flat noses like the Singhalese and Malays; so that although there was a similarity between them, yet there was a strong difference when one came to sum up the characteristics of each. The architecture of the town is peculiar, and the few old public buildings odd in the extreme.
The Singhalese hunt them for the sake of their extremely beautiful skins, but prefer taking them in traps and pitfalls, and occasionally in spring cages formed of poles driven firmly into the ground, within which a kid is generally fastened as a bait; the door being held open by a sapling bent down by the united force of several men, and so arranged as to act as a spring, to which a noose is ingeniously attached, formed of plaited deer's hide.
Foss. 502. t. 39; f. 10: The Singhalese, on following the elk, frequently effect their approaches by so imitating the call of the animal as to induce them to respond. VII. PACHYDERMATA. The Elephant. The elephant, and the wild boar, the Singhalese "waloora," are the only representatives of the pachydermatous order.
The following narratives have been taken down by a Singhalese gentleman, from the statements of the natives by whom they are recounted; and they are here inserted, in order to show the opinion prevalent amongst the people of Ceylon as to the habits and propensities of the rogue elephant. The stories are given in words of my correspondent, who writes in English, as follows: