Untitled - The Alfred Russel Wallace Website

XXII ON THE PACIFIC COAST 319
over the savanna, burst suddenly into leaves and
flowers. All this was interesting enough, but there
was a reverse to the picture. As a shower of rain
is such a rare event at Chandiiy, the inhabitants
think their houses sufficiently protected by a slight
roof of the leaves of Arrow-cane (Gynerium sp.),
through which the heavy and continued rains of
the present year have passed as through a sieve.
Figure to yourself, then, my dwelling flooded by
night bed and everything else soaked so much
wet out of doors that I could not take even such
and it
exercise as my slender forces permitted,
will not surprise you to learn that I had a severe
attack of jaundice. A little after the equinox the
weather grew drier and cooler, and my illness
began to leave me, although I have still not quite
shaken it off.
The sea-breezes, which blow from the west and
south-west, are strong and cool. We have already
and in
had the thermometer once down to 66^ ,
June and July we may expect
to see it still lower.
I walk about as much as I can, and amuse myself
with gathering and preserving the flowers, although
they are now fast drying up. The beach is rather
too steeply inclined to be pleasant to walk on, and
shells and seaweeds are rather scarce ;
but the antics
ot the burrowing crabs are diverting, and especially
their battles with my clog, who disinters them from
their holes in the sand. It is singular, however,
to have been nearly four months by the seashore
and only to have eaten fish three times, nor once
to have gone out in a boat. . . .
The industry of the Chandiiyenians, who are
nearly all pure Indians, is almost limited to the