Ceylon | by Alfred Clark
Ceylon is a pear-shaped island, a little smaller than Ireland, in the Indian Ocean, between six and ten degrees north of the Equator. From its position with reference to the mainland, it has been called by Eastern poets " the Pearl-Drop on the Brow of India".
| Title | Ceylon |
| Author | Alfred Clark |
| Publisher | Adam And Charles Black |
| Year | 1910 |
| Copyright | 1910, Adam And Charles Black |
| Amazon | Ceylon |
With twelve full-page illustrations in colour, By Allan Stewart And Mrs. C. Creyke.
Chapter I. The Island- Though separated from the continent only by the shallow Palk's Strait, some thirty miles wide, Ceylon differs so much from India in its zoology and botany that it is evident it has been an island for ...
- Chapter II. In Days Gone By
- The earliest accounts of Ceylon are purely legendary. According to Hindu mythology, the island, then called Lanka, was, aeons ago, under the sway of Ravana, a demon-king, whose power was so great that...
- Chapter III. The People
- The population of the whole of Ceylon is a little more than half that of London. It consists mainly of two races, the Singhalese and the Tamils, who are entirely different in appearance, costume, lang...
- Chapter IV. The People (Continued)
- About two-thirds of the natives of Ceylon are Buddhists, about one-third are Hindus, or worshippers of heathen gods, and about one-sixteenth are Mohammedans. The Buddhists are all Singhalese, the Hind...
- Chapter V. The People (Continued)
- It is a strange fact that, though the sacredness of life is so strenuously insisted on in the Buddhist religion, there are about five times as many murders committed annually in the Singhalese distric...
- Chapter VI. The People (Continued)
- Caste feeling is not so strong in Ceylon as in India, yet it affects very considerably the relations of the natives with each other. There is little or no intermarriage or partaking of food together b...
- Chapter VII. Colombo
- Colombo, the chief town of Ceylon, on its western side, has been described as the Halfway House of the East. Its position and its great artificial harbour, one square mile in extent, makes it a con...
- Chapter VIII. Colombo (Continued)
- The crows are a remarkable feature of Colombo life. They live in thousands in the banyan and other trees on the outskirts of the town, and make their appearance in the streets every morning soon after...
- Chapter IX. Road Side Scenes
- As their dark, windowless little huts are only suitable to sleep in, or to take shelter in when it rains, the greater part of the time of natives is spent in the open air. Consequently, many curious s...
- Chapter X. The Palm Groves
- The road from Colombo to Galle, the once famous harbour of Ceylon, is one of the most beautiful in the world. It is simply an avenue, over seventy miles long, of coconut-trees, through which peeps may...
- Chapter XI. The Gem Lands
- North of Tangala is a populous country full of villages, coconut and other estates, and paddy-fields. It is a good deal cut up by rivers and streams, over the smaller of which numerous ctandas, or nar...
- Chapter XII. The Hills
- The railway from Colombo to the tea-districts is one of the most beautiful in the world. For about forty miles it runs through level, cultivated country full of villages buried in palm-groves and coco...
- Chapter XIII. The Tea Districts
- Some sixty or seventy years ago the highlands of Ceylon were covered with an almost unbroken sheet of forest. This has been gradually cleared away, till now the only forest remaining lies along the cr...
- Chapter XIV. Adam's Peak
- The best known, but not the loftiest, mountain in Ceylon is Adam's Peak. It stands in solitary grandeur, seven thousand two hundred and sixty feet high, on the western edge of the great central platea...
- Chapter XV. The Park Country
- On the eastern side of Ceylon, stretching from the hills to the sea, is a forest tract called the Park Country, on account of its numerous open glades and grassy plains. Here are to be found the Ve...
- Chapter XVI. The East Coast
- Along the east coast stretch a number of shallow lagoons, some of which dry up during the hot season and become salt-encrusted plains. The largest of them is over thirty miles in length, and during th...
- Chapter XVII. The Buried Cities
- It was little realized in the early days of British occupation that in the forest-covered plains in the centre of Ceylon there existed the majestic remains of several ancient cities, the oldest of whi...
- Chapter XVIII. The Great Forest
- Nine-tenths of the great forest which covers all the northern, central, and eastern parts of Ceylon consist of scrub, bush-country, and grassy plains, the result of the destructive method of cultivati...
- Chapter XIX. The Jaffna Peninsula
- Jaffna is a large town situated on a peninsula, which is separated from the mainland by a shallow lagoon, called Elephant Pass. A quaint little fort, built by the Dutch in the eighteenth century to gu...
- Chapter XX. The Pearl Fishery
- At what period pearls were first found and began to be used for personal adornment is not known to history. Certain it is, however, that pearls have been fished for off the north-west coast of Ceylon ...
- Chapter XXI. Elephants
- When Ceylon belonged to the Dutch, the capture of elephants for sale was one of their principal sources of revenue. The operations were carried out in the south of the island, where elephants then swa...
