Chapter 7

PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY.--GEOLOGY.--MINERALOGY.--GEMS, CLIMATE, ETC.

GENERAL ASPECT.--Ceylon, from whatever direction it is approached, unfolds a scene of loveliness and grandeur unsurpassed, if it be rivalled, by any land in the universe. The traveller from Bengal, leaving behind the melancholy delta of the Ganges and the torrid coast of Coromandel; or the adventurer from Europe, recently inured to the sands of Egypt and the scorched headlands of Arabia, is alike entranced by the vision of beauty which expands before him as the island rises from the sea, its lofty mountains covered by luxuriant forests, and its shores, till they meet the ripple of the waves, bright with the foliage of perpetual spring.

The Brahmans designated it by the epithet of "the resplendent," and in their dreamy rhapsodies extolled it as the region of mystery and sublimity[1]; the Buddhist poets gracefully apostrophised it as "a pearl upon the brow of India;" the Chinese knew it as the "island of jewels;" the Greeks as the "land of the hyacinth and the ruby;" the Mahometans, in the intensity of their delight, assigned it to the exiled parents of mankind as a new elysium to console them for the loss of Paradise; and the early navigators of Europe, as they returned dazzled with its gems, and laden with its costly spices, propagated the fable that far to seaward the very breeze that blew from it was redolent of perfume.[2] In later and less imaginative times, Ceylon has still maintained the renown of its attractions, and exhibits in all its varied charms "the highest conceivable development of Indian nature."[3]

[Footnote 1: "Ils en ont fait une espèce de paradis, et se sont imaginé que des êtres d'une nature angélique les habitaient."--ALBYROUNI, Traité des Ères, &c.; REINAUD, Géographie d'Aboulféda, Introd. sec. iii. p.