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Updated: May 20, 2025
The headman, who himself looked half-starved, made some cakes of korrakan; but as they appeared to be composed of two parts of sand, one of dirt and one of grain, I preferred a prolonged abstinence to such filth. The abject poverty of the whole of this country is beyond description.
Whoever first saw Veddah huts in the trees would have discovered, upon enquiry, that they were temporary watch-houses, from which they guard a little plot of korrakan from the attacks of elephants and other wild beasts.
So fully aware are the natives of the impossibility of getting more than one crop out of the land that they plant all that they require at the same time. The principal articles of native cultivation are rice, korrakan, Indian corn, betel, areca-nuts, pumpkins, onions, garlic, gingelly-oil seed, tobacco, millet, red peppers, curry seed and sweet potatoes.
The havoc committed by a large herd of elephants can well be imagined. In this instance there were only three elephants a large bull, with a mother and her young one, or what we call a 'poonchy. On entering the korrakan field we distinctly heard them breaking the boughs at no great distance.
This had been a glorious hunt; many miles had been gone over, but by great luck, when the wind dropped and the elephant altered her course, she had been making a circuit for the very field of korrakan at which we had first found her. We were thus not more than three miles from our resting-place, and the trackers who know every inch of the country, soon brought us to the main road.
The korrakan is a sweet grass, growing about two feet high, and so partial are the elephants to this food that they will invade the isolated field even during the daytime. Driven out by shouts and by shots fired by the natives from their secure watch-houses, they will retreat to their cover, but in a few minutes they reappear from another part of the jungle and again commence their depredations.
Our coolies arrived at eight A.M., faint and tired; they no longer turned up their noses at korrakan, as they did at Monampitya, but they filled themselves almost to bursting. I started off V. B.'s coolies after him, also eight men whose loads had been consumed, and, with a diminished party, we started for Bibille, which the natives assured us was only nineteen miles from this spot.
We were hardly dressed before a native came running to tell us that several elephants were devouring his crop of korrakan a grain something like clover-seed, upon which the people in this part almost entirely subsist. Without a moment's delay we sent for the guns.
Can any man, when describing the "fertility" of Ceylon, be aware that newly-cleared forest-land will only produce one crop of the miserable grain called korrakan? Can he understand why the greater portion of Ceylon is covered by dense thorny jungles?
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