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Updated: May 14, 2025
About nine o'clock we reached Ambepussa, and the scenery increased in beauty from this point. A couple of hours later we reached Peradeniya, the junction for Gampola. Here most of the passengers got out, bound for Neuera-ellia, the sanatorium of Ceylon, 7,000 feet above the sea. Soon after leaving the station, we passed the Satinwood Bridge.
The largest specimens I have seen were at Gampola in the vicinity of Kandy, and one taken in the store-room of the rest-house there, nearly covered with its legs an ordinary-sized breakfast plate.
This route takes one through Gampola, which, though it is insignificant enough at the present time, was the native capital of Ceylon nearly five hundred years ago. The place is situated amid a grand panorama of magnificent hills on the banks of the river already named, which is here crossed by a suspension bridge.
At Gampola, once the capital of the kingdom, there is a rest-house where we stopped. We had now reached the region where the first successful attempt at the systematic cultivation of coffee was made in the island. It had been tried in several places in the low country, but always had failed.
This seemed a bad arrangement, for we were already late; it resulted in the poor horses having to be unmercifully flogged in order to enable us to catch the train at Gampola, failing which, the coach proprietors would have had to pay a very heavy penalty. From Gampola we soon arrived at Peradeniya, where we met Mr. Freer, who was going down to Colombo.
The proprietor told me that Sir Daniel had occupied it before me, and I found a broken fountain pen in the drawer of that sickly black teakwood desk, with the carved serpent's head. And I was at Gampola at another time, headed for the interior of Ceylon, when I learned that I was travelling again one of Sir Daniel's trails. And you were with him!" "Always," said Joanne.
"And yet if you were afraid I know it would be of just some little thing like that. My father was one of the bravest men in the world, and a hundred times I have seen him show horror at sight of a spider. If you were afraid of snakes, why did you go up the Gampola, in Ceylon?" "I didn't know the snakes were there," he chuckled.
Then we wandered down to the bamboo-fringed shores of the river, which rises in the mountains here, and flows right through the island to Trincomalee. At eleven o'clock Tom and I said 'good-bye' to the rest of the party, and went by train to Gampola, to take the coach to Neuera-ellia, where we were to stay with an old friend.
Fifty Miles into Central Ceylon. Gorgeous Scenic Effects. Gampola. The Singhalese Saratoga. A Grand Waterfall. Haunts of the Wild Elephants. Something about these Huge Beasts. European Hunters restricted. An Indian Experience. Elephants as Farm Laborers in Place of Oxen. Tame Elephants as Decoys. Elephant Taming. Highest Mountain on the Island. Pilgrims who ascend Adam's Peak.
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