A Barbarian in Asia

A BARBARIAN IN CEYLON

The best-known son of the kingdom of England, Thomas Cook, starts out on the principle that, if you travel, it is in order to see great monuments, very old and well catalogued, and to stay quite near by in a great palace, very modern, provided with an excellent restaurant where you have a large number of dishes copiously served.

For he considers that no one would set out on a journey if he did not have a big appetite.

It is this same engineer-psychologist who declares with regard to Ceylon (a property that he has been managing for forty years, to everyone’s satisfaction. Even the prisoners there have the eyes of gazelles, and the woodcutters the arms of a young girl. He calls the tigers by their names):

‘On a surface of 25,331 thousand meters, it would be hard to find assembled a larger number of natural, archeological and picturesque marvels, etc.’

Now then, Thomas, no doubt, but make a final effort, please squeeze in a bit more.

The Cingalese walks reverently. He is reverent. One day, by mistake, I went into a corridor that led to a very large hall. Religious sentiment reigned here. At one end of the hall there was a crowd, motionless, contemplative. I went forward. They were watching a game of billiards.

One day I was passing in a rickshaw through a street in the native quarter. A clamor stopped me. I got down. The noise came from a Catholic church, with all its doors open. I went in. They were reciting litanies, with such faith, with such feeling, that it was extraordinary. From time to time one of them would go up and massage one of the glass cases enclosing a small statue of a saint. He would magnetize it (all the little statues were shut up in glass houses, otherwise by the end of a few days nothing would be left of them), so he would massage it, then pass on to the next, and then another of those present would get up and ingratiate himself in the same manner.

They were visibly at home. Several were wandering among the altars in the side aisles, with palpable adoration. They were fingering the altar-cloths, the flowers, the chandeliers, with devotion resembling addiction. To tell the truth, this religion seemed to suit them. In the temples of the Buddha, they have nothing to do.

A Cingalese, one Sunday, came to harass me on my bench. He wanted to explain to me the merits of Christianity. I replied with those of Buddhism. But he would not listen. The hope, said he, paradise with God immediately after death.

It need not be supposed that all the Cingalese are slow.

Some advance in regular, almost rapid strides.

If, however, they give an amazing impression of inertia, it is owing to their lack of gestures. They talk to you without using their arms. Their arms, well, they are reserved.

The trunk immovable, undisplaced.

Tall, slender, delicate, serious, a kind of human stilts, nothing aggressive in their gaze, which one encounters like a far-off horizon, absolutely restful.

Feminine and like women who are afraid of disturbing their beauty.

Not liking to displace their center, nor to have emotion.

At a popular picture house, I saw an old Western film. Well, not for an instant did I get the impression of movement, of emotion, nor even an American impression.

This, for an astonishingly simple reason, merely that the film was accompanied by a constant pulse of formidable beats of a tom-tom, bang, bang, bang, bang, through which the religious sounds of a harmonium tried to pierce.

No other film gave me that impression of eternity, of endless rhythm, of perpetual motion.

They rushed stupidly about in this film. Nevertheless, the film was motionless. It was carried away by an immensity greater than itself, like a cage of fighting cocks in an express train.

Another thing regarding the speed of the Cingalese. You have probably seen, at least in atlases, those superb names, long, marvelous serpents with drumlike vowels: Anuradhapura, Polgahawela, Paravanalankulam, Kahatagasdigilva, Ambalantola. Well, they say them so fast and so sweetly (they erase, rub out English, in the same way) that Anuradhapura makes something hardly more important than ‘amena.’ Excepting, however, the children.

Listen to them singing and reciting in school; here is the magnificent unfolding of the contemplative words, something that is well disposed, and well understood inwardly, as when the Russian recites his admirable polysyllabic words (but there it is the consonants that come out) and as the Greeks do also (the same love of redundancy, for the lengthening and the triumphant mastication of words).