A BUSHMAN AFLOAT.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXX, Issue 8455, 4 June 1907, Page 5

A BUSHMAN AFLOAT.

By ALBERT DORRINGTON. (Author of "Along the Castlereagh," "Children of the Gully," etc.) (Published by special arrangement —Copyright reserved.) No VIII. -CEYLON. Everyone visits the Buddhist temple, where • the tooth has reposed fur centuries. The exhibition . of the sacred molar is a silly fraud. The real tooth was smuggled here from India 1,500 years ago in the coils of a princess's hair. It was afterwards stolen and passed into the hands of a Cairo Jew. After inspecting the alleged tooth it occurred to U3 that the long-departed Buddha could have easily beaten the average shark in the way of jaw formation, if the rest of his front teeth compared with the one on view. As the sun rose over the.temple roof a young Tamil girl appeared from a palm-shadowed hut, leading a small, slate-coloured bull to the sandy shore of a lagoon. Drawn about her waist was a sarong of unutterable scarlet. The bull walked beside her gravely until the lagoon water splashed their hips. Singing softly to herse'f, she began to wash the mud-covered flanks and surly head beside her. Her dripping black hair swished about her naked should- i ers as she stooped and emptied \ a vessel of water over herself and another over the sullen little buffalo.

Other girls came to the lagoon leading fawn and black buffaloes by the ears. The nuggety little animals stood motionless while the small brown hands scrubbed them from head to heel. The* Australian girl is too tired to wash her father's cows, although the writer once saw a hefty woman assisting her husband to dye ahorse* They had a scheme on hand forr uning it under a false name. The Cinnamon Gardens is a pulseless kind of a beauty spot. It is the garden of sick men and pale perfumes. Along its borders are endless, palm-sheltered roads and stagnant malarial lakes. Around these malarial lakes are scores of pretty detached villas, owned by prosperous tea and rubber planters. Every garden and lawn has its half-a-dozen native attendants, watering flowers, cutting grass, and trimming the long rows of English hedges. The affluent Cingalese merchant rides city-wards in his fashionable dog-cart or Victoria. Behind run a couple of thin-legged Tamil servants to yell at the mob and threaten the obnoxious rickshaw men. Many of the Cingalese merchants are enormously wealthy, owning large silk and tobacco warehouses. Their wives and daughters rarely associate with white men, and one seldom hears of a Cingalese girl marrying out of her religion. They are mostly Buddhists and vegetarians and when it comes to driving a bargain, the local Hebrew is comparatively a voiceless nonentity.

Between eight and nine o'clock the city roads are crowded with Cingaloe boys, hurrying to school. They read and coach each other in English as they pass along correcting their -arithmetic, r: r \ spelling aloud in their native earnestness to acquire the language. As youngsters they are abnormally intelligent and far ahead of the average British boy. In after years they fill nearly all the Government positions, from station-master to town clerk. Returned from the Cinnamon feeling hot and depressed. The numerous convalescent Englishmen, taking their early walk, made us fesl lonely. Colombo impressed us a violently unhealthy place. The death rate among locai whites this year is higher than that of the Gold Coast, West Afnca.

As we crossed the hotel mat, a Cingalee rose wearily from beneath, and told us in a faint voice that we had walked on his body. Half-an-hour later he appealed for compensation, and received threepence. Climbing the hotel stairs we stepped gingerly over the faces of the long-haired men and boys sleeping in the corridors and doorways. An hotel coolie will pass the night anywhere except in bed. He will sleep on the roof or in the bath under the shower drip. We saw several legs dangling over the water-spout immediately over the bedroom window. Spent ten minutes trying to laseoo a pair of hanging feet with some barbed wire. Feet shifted suddenly. The white man in the Tropics rarely changes his habits. He clings to his 10 x 12 bedroom, and closes the windows every /light, even though the temperature is past the nineties. The hotel bedroom kills half the white men living on the line. In Ceylon hotel rates vary from six to ten rupees a day. If a native servant extinguishes your candle at night he expects a tip, and he will follow you through the streets calling out the nature of your meanness until you disgorge. In certain districts the Government have provided rest houses for travellers. Every item is charged for separately; even bed-linen is looked upon as an extra, while bed and bedroom costs 50 cents each. A 50-cent charge for habitation knocks the Australian endwise when he scans his first bill.

The Ceylon police are unable to control the coolie mob that besiege visitors at every railway station. The unwary traveller suddenly finds himself surrounded by a clamouring, hysterical body of Tamils who refuse to let him pass until he inspects their stock of cinnamon sticks or packets of dirt-smeared post-cards. At Lighthouse Point Battery we saw a fat white man seated on a sandhill bossing a gang of girl navvies. There were' 100 in all, brown-skinned Tamil maidens of the coolie class. Some were handsome heavy-limbed youngsters, well-set and as strong as horses. They carried baskets of stone on their heads with freedom and grace. Others nianipulated sand carrying it from "the beach to the railway embankment. One or two women with children at hip slaved through the ankle-gripping drifts to deposit their load on the growing heaps. These women earn from 12 to 15 cents a day. For similar work in Australia white navvy would receive seven shillings at least and would probably throw down his basket after the first hour. Occasionally when the sand-shifters slackened their gait oi* exhibited signs of fatigue, the' fat, white overseer would rise and address the sweating female gang in a voice of

thunder. The younger Tamil girls responded like horses under the whip, outstripping the women with the babies, and flinging down their loads of stone and sand with great bravado. The- fat white man impressed me considerably. I met dozens of his kind later, while journeying from Colombo to Kandy. He is the noble, warm-water Englishman who drifts equotor-wards in quest of a soft 1 job. At home he is the man who can be spared. He has failed in the army or navy and his weary eye turns towards India or Ceylon. His lotuslike instinct warns him that Australia is no place for a drifter; and he finally wanders to the land of the coolie and the long lazy afternoon. He usually finds a billet on the rubber plantations as assistant superintendent bossing women coolies, and shouting himself hoarse over the mistakes of soft-eyed, illtrained native children. The warmwater Englishman is no doubt a good tellow in his way. He sends his wife and children to the hill sar.atoriums, and attends the funeral of his brother overseers whenever they die of heat apoplexy or overfeeding.

Still one does not care to recall the tired white man and his gang of sweating Tamil girls. It is the cry of the mother that hurts, the little pitiful calls of the child-burdened women asking for a moment's respite as they struggle over the sand drifts to build the white man's breakwaters.

(To be continued.)