A WANDERER’S NOTE BOOK.

Otago Witness, Issue 3782, 7 September 1926, Page 75

A WANDERER’S NOTE BOOK.

COLOMBO TO MARSEILLES.

By

Charles Wilson, ex-Parliamentary Librarian.

Colombo in particular, and Ceylon in general, have been so often described that one need make no apology for erring on the side of brevity in jotting down a few notes thereon. Colombo has become a quite wonderful port, with a population of not far off 300,000, an ocean jumping off place, where, if you have time to spare and possess patience, the travelling Englishman is as likely to meet a friend as at Singapore, at Port Said, or Charing Cross. According to that worth ecclesiastic, Bishop Heber, in his “From Greenland’s icy mountains to India’s coral strand,” Ceylon is a land “where every prospect pleases, and only man is vile,” which is a rather sweeping condemnation, due, so the story goes, to the fact that the bishop was, as are so many visitors to the “island of spicy odours,” somewhat badly “taken down” by the boatmen of Colombo. Today Colombo is en fete for Gautama’s birthday. the Buddhist Christmas Day, and three parts of Colombo is on a mild ”jag.” streets beflagged, flower-decked natives, the banging of tom toms everywhere, and a general atmosphere of gaiety. Closed banks and business houses are responsible for a rush of prosperous Europeans to the wavelapped Mount Lavinia tea rooms, and the famous Galle Face Hotel, and crowded motors rush through even the much thronged native quarter, both white and black chauffeurs emulating our Biblical ac-

quaintance, Jehu—“son of Nimshi,” was he not?—in driving “fast and furiously.” PROSPEROUS CEYLON. A Cingalese official, who is taking. his wife and two daughters “Home” by the good ship Mooltan, tells me much of Ceylon’s quite notably renewed prosperity. Tea is fairly high again, after a prolonged slump; rubber is decidedly blight, and industrial activity is increasing yearly, new factories continually being opened, and the trade of the port going up bv leaps and bounds. An occasional "old timer” European may grumble over the alleged latter day “uppishness” of the educated native, but I am assured that the two races get along fairly well together, and if more and more of the Government jobs are going to the darker skinned folk, after all, it is only right that the day of “the d d nigger” shall have departed, and that a juster distribution of official billets should, have become the rule. As I survey the harbour after a sweltering night, waiting for a P. and O. boat from China, which is bringing a Far Orient mail and a host of new passengers, I am struck by the astonishing number of steamers. The Union Jack floats from most of them, but alongside us are a giant American Dollar liner, a Dutch mail boat, with specially fine lines, two Japanese liners, a big German steamer, and a French warship, the latter, alas, grievously dirty and untidy. As an outpost of Enfpire, Colombo seems marvellously more busy than when I first saw it. a good score -or so of years ago. But, “Lord,” as dear old Samuel Pepy 8 says in the immortal “Diary,” it “is” hot. Even the Bourke man who, through a convenient medium, asked that his “blankets” might be conveyed to him in a place which, however rich in pals, was slightly trying as to climate, might find Colombo a trifle too sultry. But the tourist who lias happily picked up the Hindu for “get out of this,” or some hand: objurgation in the vernacular with which to assail the smirking, oily gentleman of colour who presses Brummagem wares on you at a price he is prepared, upon persistence, to reduce a couple of hundred per cent., should find it an amazingly colourful and interesting scene. I may be pardoned the regret that his Majesty’s mails from Madras, Rangoon, and goodness only knows how’ many other far-away regions, being safely stowed aboard, the giant blackfunnelled Mooltan creeps quietly out to sea, and we are off to Aden. ADEN THE ARID.

Six days or so across an almost waveless Indian Ocean and ’neath a blazing tropical sun, and we are at Aden, that bare, ugly, but in its owm way, weirdly picturesque place, where swelter a few companies of Tommy Atkinses. By this route you voyage along through an only slightly changing latitude. From Auckland to Vancouver the really very hot days are few, for the Pacific heat is dry, and one is out of the compulsory “whites in quick time, for are you not travelling north-west? Here, on the Suez route, the heat is a moist and very trying warmth, and you must “ware” sitting up on deck very late. Too hot for ship s teums and cricket, and one wearies of deck quoits. This is the weather for ices rather than the morning beef tea, and the wise traveller extends his afternoon siesta until cold oath time at sor so. Phew! Aden is hot with a vengeance, and one can scarcely blame the tourist who say s “blow the famous tanks, and jibs at pottering about the little town, in which ay. at noon, it is 122 in the shade! Still, a stroll round, Ind a motor trip up the hills, to the now well-filled but too often empty Tanks, is well worth a little extra pet-, spiration. Again the Mooltan has to wait for mails and more passengers tins time pouring in from a slow boat from Bombay, bringing a new assortment of Anglo-Indians. THE ANGLO-INDIAN'S.

These latter I find when, after dinner, we chat over coffee and nicotian joj-s, a much pleasanter and more genial lot tli.-.n I had been prepared by Australian passengers to encounter. “Stiff, egotistical, narrow-minded, and other depreciatory adjectives I had heard applied to the Anglo-Indian on leave. But, tell the truth, most of them I meet here are extremely agreeable people. . That they are not intimately versed m Australian politics, that to them the vagaries and extravagancies of Mr Lang, of New South Wales, Mr Theodore, of Queensland, and similar worthies are unknown —that their general political attitude and point of view are scarcely sympathetic to the advanced democracy of the Commonwealth, need scarcely surprise us. For this eminent legal official from Colombo, this whitehaired but genial old gentleman who has been upholding the power of the British raj in the Punjaub, and tells me all about far-away Pesliawur and bis experiences on a mission to Cabul; this railway engineer from Delhi, this Salt Tax Controller from Bangalore, and so many others who recline in deck chairs and call out “Bov, Boy,” instead of “steward are all singularly interesting people. Perhaps their point of view, their general outlook on life, is far removed from the rather intense and decidedly material commercialism of the Australian. But we cannot be all alike, and I for one greatly enjoy a gossip with men whose everyday interests must necessarily be so far removed from those of the average colonial! IN LESSEPS LAND.

Tlie worst of Melbourne’s “briekfielders,” the worst of Canterbury’s “nor’westers,” must play second fiddle to the hot breezes which greet us as we arrive off Suez, at the entrance to what was once the “Canal,” but whose supremacy as a work of engineering the Panama waterway, which links the Pacific and the Atlantic, now so proudly challenges. The opening of the doors of a blast furnace is the only acceptable simile. BifLit is not for long, and the oft-described Canal trip begins. In a couple of hours come the great searchlights, and while night is yet young the Mooltan is one of a long procession of steamers slowly parading the great highway planned by De Lesscps Alas! for poor Ferdinand! Him whom all France once honoured as a demi-god, was doomed to failure and disgrace over his later venture at Panama, but long will it be, I trust, e’er the colossal figure with arm outstretched towards the Orient, which his great work linked up with the Occident, ceases to dominate the Mediterranean entrance to the Canal. We are at Port Said early in the morning, and although the days are patf Vvcn the

steamer’s decks were want to be thronged with a brown-faced, fez-wearing crowd of vociferating vendors of every description of picturesque articles for which at first high prices are demanded, to drop as leaving time approaches to what comparatively is a figure at which even Petticoat hme would scoff. The only natives allowed on board arc an Arab agent for Reuter’s Telegram Agency and a conjuror and his assistant. Those who know Port Said must remember the sharp-eyed, terrifically voluble magician, with his trick of addressing one gentleman, “Thank you ver’ mooch, Mr Baldwin,” or his wife as “Lady Asquith,” and assuring his audience: “You see, ladies and shentlemeu, me Sandy Ferguson fra’ Aberdeen,” and declaring that he will do the mango trick when the collection box grows more satisfactorily heavy. “Girry, Girry, Girry,”-. he shouts as he places two tiny cups on the deck, makes a "pass” or two, and then shows us two eggs as he removes the cup lids, only jet further to mystify the crowd when, after a second senes of haud waves, two exceedingly/ scraggy chickens suddenly appear from the skies or the depths beneath the earth, and in a minute or two are apparently taken out of an onlooker’s overcoat. Cleverer legredemain was never seen. Even my nowadaj’s very old acquaintance, Carl Hertz, who so astonished an old Maori woman selling peaches on the Ataki railway platform by cutting open a peach and extracting a sovereign therefrom, could not have given a better sleight-of-hand show. PURIFIED PORT SAID. From a horribly dirty, slummy little sea* port town, Port Said, east of which The best is like the worst Where there ain't no Ten Commandments, And a man can raise a thirst, has now developed, largely owing to stricter British control during the war, into a fairly clean, tremendously busy, and evidently a most prosperous city. Only once to-day have 1 been pestered to purchase indecent photographs, and then only by a decidedly furtive and almost shamefaced Arab rascal, whereas, in the bad old times, the vendors of these abominations would approach an English lady and gentleman and thrust his pictorial beastliness right under the poor dames much-shocked eyes. Gone, too, are the touts of the Greek gaming hells, and -of even worse, and here unmentionable resorts. The criers of “backsheesh! backsheesh!” are comparatively few, and as we drink our iced lemon squash outside one of the big cafes, the smartly uniformed Egyptian “ bobby ” strolls around through the marble-topped tables and “ chivvies ” away the pedlars of faked amber necklaces, cigarettes, highlycoloured shawls, ebony elephants, and so forth. Below the surface, most of the old-time Port Said abominations, material and otherwise, are no doubt to be found, but unquestionably the place, once of such world-wide ill-fame, has suffered a muchneeded purification. THE BLUE MEDITERRANEAN. The substitution of oil fuel fer coal may have robbed Port Said of that weird sight, the spectacle of a long chain of Ara!)3 passing baskets of coal on to the steamer, but the change has been all to the good so far a 9 dispatch and cleanliness are concerned. No need, nowadays, to close up every porthole hermetically against the coal dust, although, alas, 1 hear a yarn of a passenger on an Orient liner losing an overcoat and its contents from his cabin a predatory Egyptian “pinehcr” having stealthily “fished” it out by means of a bamboo rod with an attached hook. Liko the ingenious and mysterious Mr Wemmickof “Great Expectations,” the thief evidently favoured the acquisition of “portable property.” By midday we are out on the Mediterranean, living well up, today, to its reputation for blueness, and smooth almost to millpond serenity. The Levant can “play up” very disagreeably when it likes in the way of weather, but the Mooltan—so steadily a ship ;by the way, that not once, since placed in the Australian trade, has she had the “fiddles” on the dining saloon tables—ploughs as quietly and smoothly away as if she were navigating Lake Wakatipu. Our luck for good weather holds right through to Marseilles — from Sydney to the French port with but one wet day. at Hobart. Messina, the city of the awful earthquake, is on’e wide blaze of electric light as we pass through the Straits, and at breakfast, next day. a fellow passenger tells me that sitting up on deck till 2 a.m., he has seen Stromholi in active eruption, a blaze of dull reddish glare. Etna, alas, has not been visible. Passing between Corsica and Sardinia, as the evening comes in we find the Gulf of Lions belying its evil reputation for bad weather, and by breakfast time we are at Marseilles, looking up from the busy harbour at the grand old church, Notre Dame de la Garde, the first sight of which has cheered so many thousands of toilers of the sea —whose barques have been in sore trouble in the Mediterranean. Enough, however, for one letter, and for to-day my discursive gossip must come to its first halt,' (To be continued.)