impenetrable by tangled underwood forming the principal features of the
landscape, a person arriving at Ceylon for the purpose of enjoying its
wild sports would feel an inexpressible disappointment.

Instead of mounting a good horse, as he might have fondly anticipated,
and at once speeding over trackless plains till so far from human
habitations that the territories of beasts commence, he finds himself
walled in by jungle on either side of the highway. In vain he asks for
information. He finds the neighbourhood of Galle, his first landing
place, densely populated; he gets into the coach for Colombo. Seventy
miles of close population and groves of cocoa-nut trees are passed, and
he reaches the capital. This is worse and worse--he has seen no signs of
wild country during his long journey, and Colombo appears to be the
height of civilisation. He books his place for Kandy; he knows that is
in the very centre of Ceylon--there surely must be sport there, he
thinks.

The morning gun fires from the Colombo fort at 5 A.M. and the coach
starts. Miles are passed, and still the country is thickly
populated--paddy cultivation in all the flats and hollows, and even the
sides of the hills are carefully terraced out in a laborious system of
agriculture. There can be no shooting here!

Sixty miles are passed; the top of the Kaduganava Pass is reached,
eighteen hundred feet above the sea level, the road walled with jungle
on either side. From the summit of this pass our newly arrived sportsman
gazes with despair. Far as the eye can reach over a vast extent of
country, mountain and valley, hill and dale, without one open spot, are
clothed alike in one dark screen of impervious forest.