Long ago, I had a professor named Mr. Cyril O. Ekanayake in Sri Lanka. I'm sure he must not be living now as he was quite elderly some 40 years ago. He was an "old school" Sri Lankan.....Sinhalese, and Buddhist, but one to fully appreciate the mosaic of ethnicity and religions and historical eras that all contributed to making Sri Lanka what it was.
I liked to hear all his stories about Sri Lanka, but my favourite was the one he told about how his father had taken him as a youth to see almost ALL the island. He spoke of jungles he'd seen, rain forests, mountains, vast plains, ruins, but my all-time favourite was his description of the island of Delft, which is an at the Northwesternmost part of Sri Lanka. He spoke of the wild ponies. How beautiful the island must have been when he saw it (maybe in the late 1920's or early 1930's).
As this article (of September 2010) points out, both the ponies and the islanders might be in peril:
http://sundaytimes.lk/100919/Plus/plus_01.html
No comments:
Post a Comment