The first thing to do is to take a rickshaw. It is fine, but fortunately cloudy; the sun is hidden. In spite of this, it is hot, very hot. The streets are made of red sand, the houses of Venetian red stone. You pass palm trees, and trees which look like acacias, only they have mingled with the intense green of their foliage a quantity of scarlet flowers. I go scudding along the street to the Galleface Hotel. You pass babus in white European clothes, and frail black Cingalese dressed in diaphanous silks, and Anglo-Indians in pith helmets. The world of Kipling is revealed to one in a trice. A long drive along the sea leads to the hotel, This is the fashionable esplanade of Ceylon. Carriages pass up and down full of wealthy natives. The sea throws up a huge long wash of booming surf. The hotel is a large white building, like the section of an exhibition. The bedrooms are high wooden cubicles. As soon as you arrive a tailor springs from somewhere and asks you if you want any clothes--thin clothes--made in the night. I don’t think I do. As soon as I have got a room and disposed of my luggage, I take a rickshaw and drive through the native part of the town. It becomes more and more like Kipling. You pass little bullocks, and natives bathing and washing clothes in a pool; shops full of fruit; natives squatting, natives talking, natives smoking. You hear all manner of cries, and you smell the smell of the East. I wander about until it is dark and then come back to dinner. The tailor appears again. I don’t want any clothes: but it is no use, one has to order them, so importunate is he. He measures me and promises to have the complete suit ready by the next morning at 6.30. It is when you are dressed for dinner and you come down into the large high dining-room, full of electric fans, that you realize that it is impossible to be cool. It is an absorbing, annihilating damp heat that saps your very being. The first thing to do is to eat a mango. Will it be as good as you are told it is? Yes, it is better. At first you think it is just an ordinary apricot, and then you think it is a banana; no, fresher; a peach, a strawberry, and then a delicious, sharp, fresh, aromatic after-taste comes, slightly tinged with turpentine, but not bitter. Then you get all the tastes at once, and you know that the mango is like nothing else but its own incomparable self.