Every Day Life on a Ceylon Cocoa Estate by Mary E. Steuart

MARCH 10th. - A long time has passed since I last wrote in my journal. An attack of fever necessitated my going for change of air to the higher country, and I had the great delight of an utterly new experience, namely being carried four miles almost straight up hill in a chair, the poles thereof resting on the shoulders of four coolies. It was an experience. To begin with, I am by no means a light weight, and one of the four coolies was such a short, slight, weak looking little man, that I felt very much as if I ought to carry him, and not he me; the difference in height between him and the others gave the chair a lurching, as well as a swinging movement. Sometimes, my little friend put the pole on his head instead of his shoulder, and then we got on better; but at the most critical moments he had a tendency to totter, which kept one on the "qui vive." In returning, I had four men of the same height, and it made a wonderful difference in my comfort. The chair was of light cane, with a head well thatched with palm leaves. It was much after the pattern of the old sedan chair, excepting that it was open instead of being closed in. The road by which we went was simply a mountain path, leading first through groves of palms, the gigantic white plumes of the blossom of the talipot palm outtopping all others; then we went through paddy fields, forded an unbridged river where I expected momentarily to be deposited in the water, and then up the side of a mountain gorge, where huge boulders encroached on the already narrow pathway, on the lower side of which, without the slightest parapet, was a precipice of several hundred feet. One false step and, for me, there would have been an end of all things. But the false step never comes, the native with his bare feet, and prehensile toes is as surefooted as a goat or a monkey.

At last we arrived at our destination, a bungalow literally covered with Cape jessamine, bougainvillea, thumbergia and other lovely creepers, built on a small plateau overhanging the gorge. Every inch of plateau has been turned into garden, or ornamental shrubbery, and in the cooler mountain air many English flowers and vegetables flourished that would pine and die in the hot low country. One hears the distant roar of the mountain torrent which works the machinery of the tea factory below, and what with the crisp air, the rush of water, and the English flowers, one could almost imagine oneself in some remote Highland shooting lodge. Inside, the bungalow was very homelike and cosy. Carpets, piano, harmonium, lovely china, glass, and silver, and above all, loads of books and magazines, left one nothing to wish for. It was a perpetual mystery to me how all these things could have been brought to their present abiding place.