Mr Sala on His Travels.

Te Aroha News, Volume IV, Issue 161, 17 July 1886, Page 5

Mr Sala on His Travels.

Mr George Augustus Sala, who has been travelling over the world during the past fifteen months, contributes some interesting " Echoes from Afar " to the two last issues of the "Illustrated London News," from which we give the following extracts. He writes from Calcutta under date March 1 : Tue Punkah. I came hither from Colombo, Ceylon, in a splendid P. and O. hight the Shannon, Captain Murray. Six: days, I think, of enchanting weather. Hot enough, and the punkahs going in the ealoon at meal times ; but I spent a good deal of my time below, writing, when the punkahs wore not going-, and I declare that I found it cooler, under those circumstances, than when the pun-kah-wallah were busied at there vocation. 1 suppose that it is a vocation. But into what does the punkah-w*llah develop ? Ah i have Been him, he is a lad of thirteen or fourteen. What does he becomeultimately ? A "college youth," perpetually ringing triple bob majors. ° Of course, in all things and in all lands. I am bound till the end of the chapter to remain a Philistine. I ever, without shame and without compunction, that I do not believe in the punkah. To me it is a mere wagging dish clout— a towel-horse with the staggers. It does not cool tho air. It stirs up the hent. And, ladies, who are subject to the wal dc mcr, I should etrpngly advise you not to cast your eyes upwards towards the punkahs— unless you are accustomed to them— while you are refecting in the saloon. That way vertigo lies ; and it is bad to be dizzy at sea. Ceylon. I spent 14 days of the fairest quiet and the sweetest rest in Ceylon. Ceylon is ouo j green garden circled by a eea ring, now ultramarine, now emerald, now cobair, now sapphire, now opalesque in tint. I was never tired of wondering at the teeming vegetation of Ceylon. The cocoa-nut, the bamboo, the palm, tbe bread fruit, tho cotton, the hybiscus, the paynan, the indiarubber, the banana, the Bougainvilliers : and once they showed me in a botanical garden a tree which I wap tuld wa* the upas, imported from Java. I smoked a " trichi " beneath its baneful branches but have not yet, to my knowledge, come to any harm thereby. All these trees I beheld with admiration and delight: but ihe ferns, abundant and exquisitely luxuriant and graceful as they were, to failed " fetch me."' The only fern paradise is in Mow Zoaland. Ceylon Hotels. At the Grand Oriental Hotel I pitchod my tent, and was very comfortable thore The next best hotel is the Guile- Face, a name which at first strikes unpleasantly on tho ear as suggestive of a scalded countenance, but which its co named because one of its sides face Galle. It is a very nice, dean, quiet family house, with a splendid sea viow and an excellent table d'hote. The Grand Oriental is, on the other hand, a very fcUbbl of noi«o. For that reason i liked it! You can be most alone in the mid«fc of a mob, You have a long Indian lounging chair — as» long as a Life Guardsman and a half ; and you put your legq on the chair's broad nrm^, and you sip youv lemonade, augo?turas, and ice ; and you need not speak to anybody and you watch the passing show. " The Light of Asia." Among the sojourners at the G.F. who spoke most highly of the cleanliness and comfort of that hostelry, and on whom, to my threat solace, I unexpectedly lighted, was my dear friend Edwin Arnold, C.5.1., author ot ' The Light of Asia." Especially had Mr Arnold come to the .Morning Land to look up bis old friends the Buddhists, whose doctrines he has co nobly expounded in " The Light of Asia." Ceylon is one of the head centres of Buddhism, Is not Buddha's tooth— which is not a tooth at all, not even a crocodile's one, but a huge malformed piece of ivory— preserved in the temple at Kandy? The Cingalese rose at Mr Arnold, even as the Drury Lane pit rose at Edmund Kean. I was present at a grand religious function of welcome offered to the author of "The Light of Asia," at a Buddhist col lege, near Colombo, at which between two and three thousand persons must have been present. Mr Arnold stood in the centre of a raided platform under a baldaquin, a kind of sanctuary, surrounded by Buddhist clerics in yellow satin dalmatics. They were " bos.sed " by a very fat hierarch— the High Priest of Adam's Peak, indeed. Litanies w ere intoned, chorales chanted, and anthems holloaed in Pali and in Cinghali. Mr Arnold was harangued in many tongues, and he replied elegantly and eloquently in English and in Sanskrit. Mr Sala Disapproves of Buddha, 1 have ray own opinions regarding Buddhism. They are those of an inveterate and incot rigible Philistine. What is termed Neo-Buddhism I regard either as so much Bedkmito bo?h, the outcome of a diseased vanity ; or aa so much impudent imposture, craftily worked for the sake of lucre. Touching real Buddhism, the creed of so many millions of our fellow-creatures, it j has practically proved much more the Darkness than the Light of Asia. The doctrine and the legend of Buddha aie doubtless very beautitul. To English readers the docbrine and the legend have been made more beautiful than they really are by the exuberance of the im agination of Mr Arnold, by his extraordinary richness of diction and fecundity of illustration. As for Buddhism in its existing aspect, tho doctrine and the legend have, in Ceylon at least, been ever so long since overlaid by a very Monk Testaccio of rags, bones, dirt, fraud, and lies. There are some learned, and I hope there are some virtuous, men amonjr the Buddhist clergy- the High Priest of Adam'e Peak should be among the number ; but I have been assured by magistrates, superintendents of police, and planters long resident in Ceylon that, as a rule, the Buddhist priests are the biggest rogues that ever cheated the gallows ; and there scarcely ever occurs a case of forgery, or coining falso money— to say nothing of darker crimes - without a Buddhist priest being directly or indirectly implicated in the matter. An Australian Experience. My own humble experience of South Australian hospitality was extensive, pleasant, and, in one instance, peculiar. I arrived in the Fair City in the winter of 18S5, at the end of July. I had brought with me but a solitary letter of introduction ; and that was from a dear friend in London to His Excellency the Governor. His Excellency and Her Ladyship were most hospitable, most gracious, and most kind. We were asked to stay at Government House. We dined and lunched, and were asked, but did not go, to balls ; and when after a fortnight's sojourn in the delightful place, I waited upon His Excellency to bid him a respectful farewell, the representative of Her Majesty ■ remarked, with an affable smile, " By-the-way, the letter of introduction which you brought me was from a gentleman whom I had not the honour to know. It is my brother, I think, that he must have meant."

how, had this appalling information been conveyed to me when I/first waited on His Excellency, 1 should have, of course, sunk through the carpet, or proceeded to the nearest spot on the Torrena River and drowned myself. With exquisite tact and courteey, the mistake which had been made was never mentioned till the we of our going away laden with a load of kindness which 1 shall never forget. Indian. Cutenoss. There ia a capital bookstall in the grand marble corridor of the Great Eastern Hotel Calcutta where you can obtain the newest fcngiish books and periodicals at price* very slightly above those which you would pay in England. For example, at the stall in question, I bought "Punch" for January dOfch ; but, when I tried to open it, I found that its outer edges were secured by a httle metallic nng-boit, or eye-let hole, with a , crab or punctise attachment. "Why this cestua 01 Aglue, this girdle of Aphrodite, this fountain sealed ?" I asked the intelligent native who ininisteied at tho stall, tie made answer, "He catchy-catch pub there, prevent Sahib open 'Punch.' Look him cartoon. Rt-ud him. Laugh him. No buy him. Walk away. Smoke cheroot. Tell 'Punch ' joke friend." There was a terribly subtle estimate of the depth of humajidepravity in the intelligent native's suggestion that the Sahib who had fraudulently perused " Punch " would not only walk away cinically smoking his cheroot, but would unbluehingly impart the choicest of the faceticc of your contemporary to his friends. But there is such a thing as the men* comcia rccti. Remorse, unlike morality (in the "Dunciad"), has not "unawares expired." In the early history of " Punch," there is an instance of an anonymous individual who sent throepence in stamps to the publisher as conscience money, he having read tho whole of the current number as displayed in the oilice window in Fleet-street. Glenelg In the third week in January in the present year, the Peninsula and Oriental steamer Massilia, Captain Shallard, on board vhich great argosy X was a passenger, on her way from Sydney to Colombo, via Melbourne and King George's Sound, touched at Glenelg to take in paseengeis and mails. Glenelg is a charming watering place, with a hospitable municipality, and a worthy Mayor, about six miles from Adelaide. We were some eight or nine j hours off Glenelg. The majority of the Ma-silia's paesengcra went ashore, and ran up by rail to Adelaide for a jaunt; but I J jemained on board, and read the " Adelaide Observor," a very interesting woekly j budget, which seems about three times as j voluminous as our "Field"; and the " Sud Australische Zeitung." There must be five or six thousand German colonists in South Australia alone, where they are, a 9 they universally approve themselves to be throughout the colonies, industrious, capable, and reputable citizens; woiking indefatigably, and prospering greatly ; waxing fat, but abstaining from kicking. In Adelaide, the German community have not only their newspaper, but their clvb — a capital club, with a lar^o and a handsome hall for amateur dramatic performances and emoking concerts. I did not land at Glonelg ; not because thf> hbat was intense, and the thermometer standing at something like ninety degrees I in the shade. At Melbourne, on New j Year's Eve, the temperature had reached a hundred and nine ; t and at noon the streets were awept by a hornblc hot wind-and-dust storm -a " brickfielder," the Victorians call it. I used to know and shudder at it, in a sandy form, in Algeria, in 1805. It comes there on the wings of the sirocco from the Sahara. I went not on shore lor the simple reason that I had too many friends in Adelaide, to say nothing of Glenelg and Port Adelaide, Mount Lofty, Mount Barton, and Gawler. The pleasant clubs, the cheery dinners, the drives, the afternoon tea°, the lively, amicable, cultured women, the sparkling, friendly, affectionate life ! It is an odd way, you may opine, of showing ; your gratitude, to give the go-by to friends whoso kindness to you was unremitting. But gratitude w as never in nay line.