第 15 页

Some one from outside the cave whistled cheerfully, and the noise came of shoes slipping over rock, and the panting of a man's breath. Presently the man himself crawled in through the narrow opening, and sat puffing and mop ping his forehead on the floor.

"Hullo, Doc.," said Tennant, " didn't expect a visit from you this morning. Have the Amer icans taken the island, and have they tariffed you out of your practice?"

"The Americans are all right at their own fireside, writing puffs of themselves in the news papers, and the island's simmered down into its usual doze again. I say, you're a pretty sort of fraud, making me out a liar like this! Here, let me look at you and see how that lung's going on."

The girl watched, holding her breath. The doctor went through his examination with care ful system. "Well," she whispered when he had finished, " is it consumption?"

"It's a marvel. He was as clear a case of phthisis as ever I saw when he landed, and between ourselves I didn't give him long to live, though of course I didn't breathe a word of that to anybody."

"Yes, you did," said Tennant, with a grim chuckle; " you said five months and eighteen days was the exact length of my tether."

"I said nothing of the kind: it would have been most unprofessional. The beggars invented it. But anyway, young man, your disease is stopped, and you can make the most of that. How it's been done, the Lord above knows best. It may be the air up here, or the water, or some hidden virtue in the cave, or that diet of mummy-wheat gofio which Addingham tells me you're so keen on. I don't know which it is. I wish I did. If I'd the ghost of a notion, I'd write a letter about you to the Lancet, and claim to have found a new consumption cure, and become famous."

"Then do you warrant me sound?" asked Tennant, with almost a tremble in his voice.

"You're marvellously, yes, miraculously better than you were when I saw you last, but you'll do with a bit more coddling before you leave the island, and after that you can go home, and know yourself to be as sound a man as there is in England."

"Am I to go down to Las Palmas again, then?"

"We-11, 1 don't personally admire your carriage entrance here in fact, I'm not built for these sort of gymnastics; but as the neighbourhood seems to suit you so finely, I'd stay on a bit longer if I were you and complete the cure. Of course, you've lost your mate, I know. He told me just now he daren't come back, because he was afraid you'd shoot him on sight for what he'd done."

"I fancy I'd let him off."

"I think he could be replaced," said the girl, with a blush. " The guide-book said there was an English chaplain on the island."

"Of course there is," said the doctor, still mopping with his handkerchief. 'Think we're heathens and savages? My dear, you shall come home again with me to-night, and to-morrow we'll bring up the padre and fix you up nice and tight." He nodded to Tennant. " My man, you needn't look scared. I know what you think, and I know what's right. I'll take the responsi bility for this, and I don't make a mistake a second time. But there's one thing I want to impress upon you. When you do set up your new mSnage up here, buy your bananas and chickens openly, and pay for them in hard pesetas. They say there's a chicken thief some where in this neighbourhood, and the farmers are beginning to lay traps for him."

"I've done with disreputableness," said Ten nant, gaily. " We'll be the most respectable pair of cave dwellers in Grand Canary. By the way, Mary, I'm a bit behindhand with news, but er are you going to be a countess to-morrow?"

"A countess? I don't understand. Oh, yes, I see what you mean." And she laughed. "No, the doctors made another mistake there, and that cousin of yours hasn't got Bright's disease at all. He'll probably live on for years, and you're as poor as a rat, dear. If you hadn't been," said she, cocking her chin at him, " I shouldn't have been brazen enough to come here for you."

"'Don't believe you," said Tennant, cheerfully. "I say, old lady, what frauds these doctors are!"

"I haven't made a mistake about you this second time, anyway," said the Las Palmas doctor, as he fanned himself with his hat. "I can tell you I look upon you with remarkable pride and gratification. Why, man, think what an advertisement you'll be for Grand Canary! In a month's time you'll be having a syndicate coming to the cave here, asking what your terms are for an exhibition as Strong Man in the London music halls."

"All right," said Tennant; "anything, so long as you've brought me to life again."

The girl linked her fingers over his arm, and looked up wistfully into his worn face, and mur mured, " Life! Isn't it wonderful, wonderful?"

X

THE PLACE OF THE SACRED BO-TREE

PLEASE you to mount the carpet and travel backwards through a matter of two thousand years. It is our will that you land upon the Dagoba of Thuparamaya, the relic-shrine built by a devout king in his city of Anuradhapura to contain the collar-bone of Buddha.

Behold the city spread beneath you a great place of palaces and temples, of red-brick houses of the wealthy set amid fruit gardens, of squares bedecked with elephants and bulls in stone, of wide long streets lined with the bazaars, of narrow alleys squalid with Eastern garbage and naked children. Behold this city fifty-two miles around its ring, sixteen miles across from gate to gate. Remember that mushroom London has yet to crawl forth from the forests and swamps which flank the Thames; and that amongst the hills where Edinburgh is to arise, a prowling savage hunts the beasts with a stoneshod mace. Realise that you are gazing down upon Anuradhapura of Ceylon in the height of its fame, and with the mists of twenty centuries brushed away.

The air is clear as nothingness, rich bright blue overhead, and the colours which paint the city come to you vivid and undiminished. You glance over the whole wide ring of the boundary walls, and remember that within them are penned three millions of human beings. You see them on the housetops, in the gardens, in the streets, and you hear the hum of them from the doorways and through the shuttered windows. The streets squirm like tortured snakes amongst the houses, divorced as far as may be from any cramped rectangular plan; the houses are built with in finite variety of form and colour; the dust rises in faint brown clouds from the feet of the traffic.

It is a city of processions, and every street has its cavalcade. A lady of the harem rides by in her shuttered palanquin, and the bearer-coolies shout to clear the crowd. A pearl-captain with a little leathern pouch follows, surrounded by his crew well armed, carrying the spoils of a year to the merchant who employs him. A religious procession of a thousand pilgrims and a score of ochre-robed priests treads on their heels. Then come more coolies with bales of silks from Indiaacross-the-water, and bronze sword-blades, and wood for the lance-shaft sellers in the bazaar. The striped awnings above reach half-way across the street, and under them the hard red brick of the houses gives out the heat soaked in through many centuries. But the units of the great city never rest. They are no worn-out race of Orientals. They are a people in their prime they are full of a huckstering feverish energy.

In the main street of the city, a gorgeous thoroughfare of ten thousand houses, a little storm arises. A naked thief has pilfered from one of the merchant's stores displayed under a cavernous archway. A servant runs out to seize him, and the fellow struggles. Blood is shed. A guard of armed men presses up through the gathering crowds clanking, stalwart, upright. They seize the thief, words are spoken, and the thief ceases to exist as an entire man. Then they take money from the merchant and depart to the place from which they came, leaving be hind them a battered corpse in the roadway. The gaunt dogs are already beginning to arrive from down the alleys, and the carrion fowl col lect above the housetops. It is an incident not uncommon. There are three millions of people in the city, and order must be kept.

A swarthy, reckless-looking fellow rolls up the street, kicks one of the pariah dogs out of his way, and proceeds to do business with the merchant who has just been despoiled. He wears a purple rag round his neck, battered armour on his trunk, and a broad axe slung by a thong to his wrist. He has got so thoroughly used to danger of every conceivable sort that ten minutes of assured safety would unnerve him. He is mariner, ped dler, pirate the last always when occasion serves. His home is in the distant sea-port of Tyre, in the little-known northern sea. He has brought with him a tiny cargo of dye-stuffs for disposal, and habit makes him plant his back against the wall and grip the axe-handle as he barters.

Another religious procession with densely filled ranks surges by and blots the Tyrian and the merchant from view. This one goes to a temple, and the yellow-clad priests chant, and butterflies flicker in the gloom before the image of the god. Buddha is great, and his worshippers devout. Throughout all the days of the year and through all the nights they cease not in their prayers and praises. The rest of the city may sleep, but not the priests. When one tires, another takes his place; and when one dies, a novice joins the priesthood. The man who scoffs at religion is a man yet to be born long centuries hence.

But the people are not without their lighter moments. In the squares and in the public gardens are platforms on which men and women dance and posture, and trained animals show their tricks, and jugglers make a mango tree grow out of a seed, or throw a rope into the air and climb up it and disappear into nothingness. There are feastings too, and races, fights with the knuckle-duster and tricks on the balanced pole; and those who come to watch, and those who stay to feast, pay in kind or coin according to what they get and according to their means.

There are baths, too, which are places for luxury and rest. They are placed in every ward of the city and are built for every caste and grade. There are baths built of marble and baths of homely granite. There are private baths in the houses of the king's brothers of burnished gold and ivory.

And over all, the soldiery of the king keep guard and order.

The king! Yes, a real king; a monarch such as has ceased to exist for many a weary century, and who lives in a palace appropriate to his state. You that stand on the high dome of the Dagoba of Thuparamaya, behold! This royal dwelling is built in a square, with sides 230 feet in length, and the uppermost storey is the ninth above the ground. On every floor there are a hundred rooms, and in every room four windows filled in with gilded trellis. Above all is a thing which one believed to exist only in the Arabian Nights Entertainment a roof of polished brass. See the winking splendour of it under the blaze of sky, and guess at a millionth of the things that have passed beneath its shelter!

There is a procession of howdahed elephants coming up this moment huge fellows without tusks, who plod on entirely careless of the crowds which scuttle from their path. A glittering squadron of cavalry attends them, and the ban ners tell that the pageant is made to escort in a visiting king from his halting-place without the city walls. The great bronze doors open, and he passes into the palace, and the doors clash behind him as they have closed on the heels of mightier than he. Hiram of Tyre (in earlier days) has sent an embassy to that palace, and with him was a hook-nosed man who took back word to Jeru salem of "apes and peacocks," and excited a new avarice in blas Solomon.

Dynasties might change had changed but that palace with its glitter of roof was destined to endure down eight centuries, and to house a king who was a real king. It was always the king who did everything, whose will was the people's law. One king built palaces, another bazaars; one spent his life in war, and another in breeding peacocks. King Prakrama it was who, for the better water-supply of his country, caused 1470 tanks to be constructed, which were to be known as the " seas of Prakrama " all down through the ages. But Oevenipiatissa the King (of 307 B.C.) was the most renowned of all, for he it was who set up the cult of Buddha, as the national worship, and who planted the sacred Bo-tree (in 288 B.C.).

The tree was started as a trivial budding slip. They brought it to him from far without his city of Anuradhapura, in a great procession which gathered pomp and numbers as it ad vanced. It was a cutting from the tree under which Gautama had become Buddha a thing of indescribable holiness a gift more precious than all the king's possessions. He honoured it fittingly. He built a temple of red brick for its attendant priests, and in the walled courtyard of the temple, on a triple platform of cunning archi tecture, they planted the little switch of wood. The tree grew, looking like a banyan with branches which did not root, and it put forth heart-shaped leaves with long, attenuated points. The folk from India-across-the-water who came to do pilgrimage there called it Pipal; but the men who came in later years, after the manner of their islands, called the tree a sacred fig, or, when they wanted to be pedantic, wrote it as Ficus religiosa.

* * * * *

And now, you who read this, step from the carpet which has held you back fifteen centuries in the past, and look at Anuradhapura as it is in the current year of grace. You will see some evidences of those old scenes still around you; and for the rest you must wade through the "Mahawansa," which is a metrical "Baedeker" written in the Pali tongue.

The city has fallen upon evil times, and the decay of age has gripped all her bones. The king and his three millions of subjects are not, and the fierce-growing Singhalese flora has in vaded even the sanctity of the temples. The great houses and bazaars are mouldering rubbish-heaps. The stone bulls and elephants peer from amid scrub that is hung with orchids. The king's palace itself shows only a bristling forest of sixteen hundred granite columns sprouting out from a wilderness of rubble. Of the great brass roof, who shall say into what melting-pots the plates of that have found a way?

The forest is the chief holder of the city now. Trees girdle the fallen images, and smother from sight the domes of the huge relic-shrines. Shrubs have levered down a milliard milliard bricks; rank jungle-plants have burst up the tooled stone causeways. But man has never lost entire touch with the place, and to-day he is regaining possession. A squalid native village has always huddled amid the centre of the ruins, and this is now beginning to glow with a newer life. The agents of the Crown Colony of Ceylon have it in hand. The great tank of Kalawewa, which for centuries had been a ruin, was in 1888 repaired after years of labour, and once more Anuradhapura has water flowing through her ducts. There is a Government rest-house, a British magistrate to punish the evil-doer, and police to spread the law of the land. On clear nights one can hear the scream of the locomotive whistle from the terminus at Matale. The age is utilitarian. Even dead Pharaoh is hustled from his grave to become a spectacle.