File:In old Ceylon (1908) (14780068431).jpg

Identifier: inoldceylon00farr (find matches)
Title: In old Ceylon
Year: 1908 (1900s)
Authors: Farrer, Reginald John, 1880-1920
Subjects: Sri Lanka -- Description and travel
Publisher: London : E. Arnold
Contributing Library: University of California Libraries
Digitizing Sponsor: MSN

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Text Appearing Before Image:
, and would still have ghostly tenants to-day in the twilight, were but the disturbing intrusion of ones own bodily presence removed. For this first pool is not the only carved treasure that huddles in the cliffs foot amid the debris and the fallen leaves of centuries. Just beyond there lies another pool—simpler, smaller, and yet in its way more elaborate. The first had a bath within a bath, regularly walled, with perfect copings and mouldings; a carved dressing-chamber within the rock, and pillars cut from the same to hold the roof. This second one is rougher in design—a bald square, with a simple cavity cut in the sloping rock behind. But that slope is carved into the finest piece of naturalistic sculpture in Ceylon. Through a field of great lotuses wild elephants go trumpeting and plunging; their drawing, their execution, their spirit, is no less vivid and faultless than those of the elks and mammoths, drawn long since on bone bythose first realists in art, the nameless savages of the Tarn
Text Appearing After Image:
Rock-hewn bathing pool near Issurumuniya. AN ABBEY AND A HERMITAGE 329 and Garonne. Delicate, fiery, skilful, this sculpture has every merit, Alas that it stands here, tragic and forgotten,open to the rains of the ages, veiled with dead leaves that lodge in the deep lines of the work, corroded by thedamps and lichen of the dell ! And here the clearing ends. We must leave that for-saken bathing-place, that holy quiet spot amid the tangled tumbled rocks that range along the side of the wooded lake. We must climb the embankment, continue along it in the eye of sunset, and so, descending, wind by devious tracks along tiny rushing streams from the sluice,all bedded in greenery and great trees, past the grounds of the new hotel, back into the Sacred City. CHAPTER XVIII mihintal:^, the holy hill Not in ordinary circumstances does a bullock-cart smile upon me. Slow, and slow beyond words, painful and lumbering, is ones progress in the tiny arched-in caravan, springless, like a section of a minute

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