The sick man was so infuriated that he hurled his books of religion at the colonel, and sprang out of bed. Next day he was quite well. Another member of the staff was mounted one day upon a red horse (they paint their horses in India), a wild, half-broken Arab steed, which was giving its rider a deal of trouble. I advised my friend to dismount, and left him. Presently I rode back to find him on foot and alone. I asked him, where was his horse? "Gone," said he. "Whenever that d----d horse saw a mosquito, it sat down and cried like a child. So I kicked it in the belly and it ran away into the jungle." We visited Trincomalee, where the elephants built the dockyard. They carried the timber and they carried the stones, and they lifted the stones into position and adjusted them with their feet. The remarkable thing about the climate of Ceylon is its intermittent showers of tropical violence, followed by bursts of sunshine. In the result, you actually see the foliage growing. I remember the extraordinary beauty of the native decorations, which are fabricated of palms and leaves and flowers. From Colombo we went to Mauritius, arriving there in May, 1870. Here I climbed the famous mountain called Pieter Botte, or, more correctly, Pieter Both. [Illustration: PIETER BOTH MOUNTAIN, MAURITIUS] The mountain is so named after Pieter Both, Governor-General of the Dutch East Indies in the early part of the seventeenth century, and the founder of Dutch power in that region. On his homeward voyage he was wrecked in the bay overlooked by the mountain, which thereafter bore his name. Previous ascents are recorded in the archives at Mauritius, from which it appears that mine was the fourteenth. Admiral Sir William Kennedy ascended Pieter Botte in 1861; he gives an account of his climb in his {105} interesting book, _Hurrah for the Life of a Sailor_ (London, Nash). Kennedy started with a party of fourteen persons, of whom five reached the summit. At nine o'clock in the morning I started, together with the captain of the maintop, Edward Hele. We took with us ropes, a rope ladder, cod-line, and a small lead. These were all our appliances. We drove to the foot of the mountain and began the ascent at 11.5 a.m. Now the mountain of Pieter Botte is shaped like a church with a steep roof, from one end of which rises a spire. This pinnacle of rock is crowned with a huge, rounded, overhanging boulder.