Silindu's compound. He found Silindu sitting in the shadow of the hut.

'I heard,' he said to him, 'that you have an ulcer in your foot. Let me see. Aiyo! caused by a bad thorn! Here are some leaves. I brought them with me. They will do it good.'

Silindu had been unable to walk for some days owing to the swelling and pain. He was very glad to show the foot to the vederala. Punchirala sat down to examine it, and Karlinahami and Babun came out to see what was going on. This was exactly what Punchirala wanted. He heated the leaves by putting them in hot water, which he made Karlinahami fetch. He tied them on with much ceremony, and then the whole party squatted down to talk.

'This medicine I learned from my father,' he told them. 'It is of great power. It will draw the evil and the heat out of the foot into the leaves, and to-morrow you will be able to walk.'

The power of medicine and spells was a subject which never failed to appeal to Karlinahami.

'They say your father was a great man, and that in those days people came to the village from all sides for his medicine.'

'Ah, but he was a great man, and I have all my knowledge from him. Now the Government builds hospitals, and makes people go to them, and gives them Government medicine, which is useless. And so our work is taken from us, and people die of these foreign medicines. But my father was a great man. He knew of many charms: one which would bring any woman to a man. There is a tale about that charm. In those days there lived a Korala Mahatmaya by the sea, a big-bellied man, a great lover of women. Down the coast, beyond his village, was a village in which only Malay people live. The Malay women are before all others in beauty, very fair, with eyes shaped like pomegranate seeds. They are Mohammedan people, and no Sinhalese can approach their women; for the men are very jealous, and also strong and fearless. They are bad men. The Korala Mahatmaya used to go to the village on Government work, and every time he walked through the street, and saw the women peeping at him from the doorways—and he saw their eyes shaped like pomegranate seeds, shining beneath the cloths which covered their heads—he was very troubled, and longed to have a Malay woman. At last he could bear it no longer: so he lay down in his house, and sent a message to my father to say that he was very ill, and that he should come to him at once. Then my father went three days' journey to the Korala's house; and, when he came there, the Korala Mahatmaya 

 Prev. P 34/156 next