LANDS OF THE MOONLIGHT.

Otago Witness, Issue 2103, 14 June 1894, Page 40

LANDS OF THE MOONLIGHT.

(Specially Written for the Otago Witness.')

By Beknaed Espinasse.

INTRODUCTION.

1 am standing on the summit of a lofty tower, looking down upon a sleeping city — down upon the roofs of countless houses gleaming white in the light of the moon ; and as I turn and look up at the shield of silver]bucklered upon the sky, my thoughts wander off in a maze of fancies. I think of the Queen of Night from her throne on high looking down upon the world ever with the pale serenity of a face that has seen the hurrying of the ants in the ant hills for many countlesss generations ; that has seen Time himself grow up from a laughing, merry-hearted boy to become a peevish and wearied greybeard. I fancy the moon placidly beaming upon old English towns, upon rook-haunted manor houses and the ivied casements of village churches, upon Kentish fields and waving meadows, upon flower-scented farms, and homesteads with the fresh breath of the corn lingering about their thresholds. I picture its light falling softly upon quiet churchyards, the crisp snow lying lightly between the graves, and the white stones shining like eternal emblems of peace and rest. I see it upon deserted streets in the silence of night, lighting up dark alleys and frequented ways, trodden by so many feet in the busy day, now so still in the moonlight, as if the last day had come and all the world were asleep. I feel j,it — ever with the same .passionless radiance — upon bleak moors and desert place?, upon th<3 ruins of dead cities, where in the yesterday of years man breathed, loved, sinned, sorrowed, and died ; and so, going the whole weary round, crumbled into the dust whence he came.

And now I fancy it upon green glades in the hearts of great forests, and straying with murmuring streams into broad rivers flowing between gceen banks, and so out into the great sea. And then to picture the moon upon the ocean 1 The vast waste of waters bounded only by the wide circle of the horizon, the desolation of eight and of space upon the deep, the mighty albatross slowly wheeling his giant flight with outstretched wings above the waves, and the moonbeams dancing upon the billows ! Now I am possessed by THE SPIEIT OB 1 THE DKEAM. I seem to behold the moonlit ocean crowded with ships, their white sails flashing above the surge, still passing by and still coming on. And the moon seems to show ma that they are packed to the hatches with merchandise, with rare curios, with gold and silver and precious stones, and with all that a world can yield, from the depth of her mines, from the heights of her mountains, from the looms of her mills, and from the hands of her nations. Then Luna lightly touches my eyes with her magic wand, and I see the grandest vision that ever the eyes of mortal man beheld. For annihilating time and space,' and travelling upon the moon's bright beam, as Erfuros bestrode the rainbow, I see spread beneath, in one magnificent bird's eye view, all the places of the earth, and the moon shines upon all.

Upon Britannia, regnant on the lion, the Una of civilisation ; upon London, manyspired, rising behind an abattis of masts. From the battlements and turrets of smokeclouded Edinburgh to the green slopes of Queenstown Harbour, where the leviathans of the deep, panting from the buffets of the Atlantic, lie breathing forth smoke and twinkling with red eyes. Across the water belt she shines upon many a vine-clustered village in France, upon many a quaint gabled town in the great Fatherland, on fishermen's huts clinging to the bsetling crags that overhang Icelandic fjords, and on the frowning forts that face the wrack and fury of the Baltic Sea. She touches with the sceptre of night Vienna, ths Cleopatra of Europe; Berlin, the cradle of the sword ; and Paris, the Hypatia of the nineteenth century. She climbs up the leafy slopes of the Tyrol, and peep 3 into many a villager's cottage, dives into the dark recesses of the Hartz Mountain?, and floods with her light the r jugh earthen floor of many a poor charcoalburner's hut. She lingers lovingly on the Swiss valleys, and turns to liquid silver the placid bosom of the Lake of Como. Now in all her refulgent beauty the moon shines down upon the Cityjof the Waters ; the doves are fluttering in the square of St. Mark's, and the gondolas are gliding to and fro in the streets of Venice. Anon her pale beams are straying amid the ruins of the Coliseum, the gladiators are battling in tha arena, and the amphitneatre is filled once more with the purple- robed majesty of Rome. S'ae shines upon Genoa, and the shade of the discoverer of a world pores over musty tomes and reads there with prophetic eye 3 what no man ever read before. She Bhines upon Madrid, and the tinkling of guitars is heard on the star-lit banks of the MaDzanares. Upon the temples and columns of deserted Greece, upon the domes and cupola's of Constantinople, upon St. Petersburg, wrapped in its mantle of snow, upon the gates and archways of Jerusalem, upon the crescantcrowned spires of Mecca and the bazaarlined streets cf Ispahan, upon the red walls of Morocco, and the latticed casements and winding ways of Cairo the blest, the moon shines down.

To Ceylon !— the nest of the Halcyon, where the moonbeams are silver dust upon coral reefp, within which the water lies so calm and pure and clear that the golden sands glisten long fathoms down, and the feathery wreaths of amber eeawead may be seen waving to and fro on the ocean bed, like mermaids' hair.

To India ! The sacred Ganges is basking in the moonlight, the minarets lift their summits to the sky, and the fires on the Ghauts are crimson against the night. To China ! The moon looks sadly down upon the home of the oldest people in the world, whose pagodas speak of a time that was hoary before we began to count the passing of the year?.

To Japan I where Fujiyama, with her diadem of snow, raises her head above the eternal clouds, and mocks the generations that can never be young. To Africa I where the mountains of the moon tower up above the dark valleys and the dim forests, the home of the pigmies, where, under the shade of the palms, man — most primitive— ls most happy. To Egypt! Ah, the moon falls tenderly and reverently here tin the great necropolis of the past. Softly upon the stony brow of the Sphinx, that from her place amid the sands gazes steadfastly into the face of eternity. Awfully upon the Pyramids, pointing heavenward, and covering the dust of buried kings — gieiter, nobler, more God like, and yet more manlike, in their day .of supremacy than the world has seen through thousands of rolling years. It is here amid th 9 mighty shadows of these everlasting monuments that Time broods ovar the ashes of long-extinguish fires, and the flitting ghosts of a dead past are whispering in his ear .that all things, the greatest and the least, empires and Republics, genius and majesty, power and pomp — all must pass away and be forgotten. Solemnly it falls upon the Nile, oldest of rivers, that flowed between its papyrus-fringed banks when the world was an infant at the breast of Nature, and the gloom of the ages that are forever gone wraps it in an eternal twilight. And so the moon's |ray travels on, to the farthest north, where the mystery of the Pole is still unrevealed save to it, and the Esquimaux alone dispute the Bovereigaty of the ice king. To the south, to Edens of the Pacific, where on the sparkling strands of mangrove- belted islands the ripples, lapping lazily, break in showers of liquid diamonds. To the farthest west, whore the buccaneers of old have stored legendary treasures in the caves of the Bahamas.' And to the uttermost east, where the fabled dragons guarded the apples of the Hesperide3.

To America! The Titanic 1 The workshop of the giants !

To Australia I Mighty in the desolation of her trackless bush, stony deserts, and thirsty raogae.

To New Zealand I favoured child of Nature I The moon wraps- the" mantle of her light about thy untrodden hills, thick with the growth of unnumbered years, rearing their summits, brown as a vulture's wing, to the clouds of heaven. And the waterfall, gleaming through the ferns, is as the radiant glory of a child of the beautiful, smiling up in the face of its mother.

NO. I.— THE ISLAND OF CEYLON. To travellers, the East has ever been glorified and made memorable in their minds by reason of the wealth of its sunlight. To me it has always been the Land of the Moonlight. Nowhere in the world is the Queen of Night more regal and more glorious than amid the sombre Bhades of Indian cities. She seems to shine there with a weird radiance that no pen can clearly describe, and of which tfnly the painter's brush can attempt an imitation. It is with a poor endeavour to give some expression to the feeling — which must surely have struck everyone who has ever visited them — that the places I am about to describe are Cities of the Night, that I have christened the following brief memoranda of travel, "Lands of the Moonlight."

Of all the beautiful jewels that Nature, in her happiest moods, has placed in the girdle of the World, the island of Ceylon is •' that precious stone which hath no lustre equal to its own." Tha Jews believe it to *be the Ophir of the Bible. Among the Arabians it lives, in that ever-remembered book of our childhood's days, as the scene of Stnbad's adventures in Sarendib. To the Chinese it is Lanka the Resplendent. And to us it possesses a still more beautiful meaning, for in Ceylon it. has long been believed is to be found the site of the Garden of Eden.

I will try to describe it as I saw it, not long ago, from the deck of an ocean liner one beautiful night.

The long, undulatiDg, glassy roll of- the Indian Ocean ceases as it meets the quiet waters of Colombo harbour, and as wo glide to our anchorage we leave behiDd us a ribbon of silver, that teams to stretch out uutil it reaches the horizon's edge, and is takon up iato the stars. Before us lies the island, faintly bathed in moonlight, which juat tips the long frirge of cocoatiut palaw on the coast line, and brings Into relief the black patch from out of the midat of which a cluster of lights marks where the town lies. And high above them all, as if it were hanging in the air, a solitary star comes and goes like the mysterious Algol of the further heavens. More than 10 miles out at 3ea we had noticed this flash of light, coming out of the darkness like lightning in a clear sky. It beams a greeting to the ocean from the summit of a lafty clock-tower in the market place, rising high above the surrounding roofs and treetops, crowned, Cyclop3-Hke, with a single eye, which winks every half minute. On tha starboard bow the shore is dotted with lights, out to the palm-tipped point, at the Gdlle face, where the Cingalese have kindled one of their festival bonfire?, and are moving round it, spectre-like, in the red bLza. Along the other shore the moonlight outlines a sequence of low, red-tiled sheds, where enough coal i 3 stored to fuel the fleets of the world ; and ahead of us a long, white streak, the famous breakwater, of which I shall have something to say presently, stretches its great leDgth along tha water, terminating in a lighthouse at its furthest ex'remity, surmounted by one Eteady red lißht, lookiog in the moonlight as if the bleached skeleton of some sprawling centipede of mighty bulk had reared up on end and was gloweriDg seaward with a fiery eye. The harbour is crowded with shipping, the massive mail boats of the P. and O , Orient, and B I. (British India) fleets predominating. Close to us some leviathan of the deep, every porthole shining along her black side, glides majestically by, and openiDg her uhouldcrs to the seas, ie presently swallowed up in the darkness.

Not a sound comes from the shore, and the breezes, fragrant with sweet odours, breathe around us an air of tranquillity and peace. The dip of an oar breaks the stillness now and then, and we hear, comic g off the water from afar, the "Abbah!" rising and falling with that melancholy cadence peculiar to the cry of the Cingalese boatmen. From aboard two Liverpool liners berthed far out, alight and busy, preparing for departure with the daylight, arise the creakine of ohains and the clank of the wiaches Lying alongside of them are lighters filled with coal, which hundreds of Cingalese are emptying into the bunkers by torchlight. Presently the black mass of one of these barges floats dimly past, and we see a sight not readily forgotten.

Against the red glare of the flaring torches a hundred black forms are vividly distinct. As they slowly slip by, sitting, ape-like, along the sides of the barge, naked, their knees drawn up to their chins, their long, bony arms hanging down, literally glisteniDg from head to foot with coal dust, with which their glossy skins are coated, their teeth red with betel, their eyes gleaming and their heads shaven, with one tuft of hair on the crowD, the mind coDJures up a vision of Charon ferryicg a troop of devils across the Styx.

At length the long, quiet night faded away, the sun rose like a king coming to his kingdom, and Colombo was before~our eyes. A stretch of white beach, a fringe of palm forest, a few brown houses crouching humbly at the feet of gigantic palms 60ft in height, and the native population swarming off to us in every imaginable kind of craft that will float, down to a log with two brown pirates astride of it, and clambering up our Bides, eager to sell us precious stones, silk handkerchiefs, and all manner of bogus merchandise. Most of them came oil in catamarans. These are long canoes, made of thick bamboos and reedp, very narrow and uncapsizable. This latter quality is due to an ingenious contrivance. From the side run too curved poles, like outriggers, with a log across the end of them, joined to each, and resting on the water. Thus no amount of pressure from above can sink a catamaran, and only a severe gale of wind getting under the poles could lift them and turn her over. When there is any danger of that one of the rowers clambers out along the pole and sits on the log (the catamaran proper) in the mater. His weight supplies the counterpoise. From this custom arise the terms among them, a " one-man gale " and a " two-man gale." Their methods of propulsion are peculiar. Having no idea of leverage on their oars, they sit at the end of the craft and row (if the phrase can be' applied to what is nothing but a series of wild splashings) right across their bodies with a pair of 9ft clubs, very heavy, very unwieldy, and wholly' ridiculous in respect to speed. Under these conditions a catamaran achieves about a mije.an hour.

The daylight showed us one object of interest, which immediately attracted all our attention — namely, the magnificent breakwater, which has transformed what was once an open, monsoon-swept roadstead into one of the safest and most commodious havens in the East. Built of concrete blocks weighing as much as 32 tons each, and running out into the sea for nearly four-fifths of a mile, it may bj| said ro be one of the bestconstructed to be found anywhere in the world. The plans were furnished by Sir John Coode, the first block "laid" by H.R.H. the Prince of Wales on December 8, 1875, and the work (performed entirely by convict labour) occupied nine and a-half years, at a cost of close on £800,000. The Bight of the breakers in monsoon time, thundering against the granite wall and dashing their spray 100 ft into the air, is one of the grandest that Colombo can show the visitor.

My second half of this aiticle will treat of Colombo from a shore view, and of some of the beauty spots of Ceylon.