“The following morning, anxious to gain a height in time to avail myself of the clear atmosphere of sunrise for my observations, I started off by myself through the jungle, leaving orders for my men, with my surveying instruments, to follow my track by the notches which I cut in the bark of the trees.  On leaving the plain, I availed myself of a fine wide game track which lay in my direction, and had gone, perhaps half a mile from the camp, when I was startled by a slight rustling in the nilloo[1] to my right, and in another instant, by the spring of a magnificent leopard which, in a bound of full eight feet in height over the lower brushwood, lighted at my feet within eighteen inches of the spot whereon I stood, and lay in a crouching position, his fiery gleaming eyes fixed on me.

[Footnote 1:  A species of one of the suffruticose Acanthacea which grows abundantly in the mountain ranges of Ceylon.  See ante, p. 90 n.]

“The predicament was not a pleasant one.  I had no weapon of defence, and with one spring or blow of his paw the beast could have annihilated me.  To move I knew would only encourage his attack.  It occurred to me at the moment that I had heard of the power of man’s eye over wild animals, and accordingly I fixed my gaze as intently, as the agitation of such a moment enabled me, on his eyes:  we stared at each other for some seconds, when, to my inexpressible joy, the beast turned and bounded down the straight open path before me.”  “This scene occurred just at that period of the morning when the grazing animals retired from the open patena to the cool shade of the forest:  doubtless, the leopard had taken my approach for that of a deer, or some such animal.  And if his spring had been at a quadruped instead of a biped, his distance was so well measured, that it must have landed him on the neck of a deer, an elk, or a buffalo; as it was, one pace more would have done for me.  A bear would not have let his victim off so easily.”

It is said, but I never have been able personally to verify the fact, that the Ceylon leopard exhibits a peculiarity in being unable entirely to retract its claws within their sheaths.

Of the lesser feline species the number and variety in Ceylon is inferior to that of India.  The Palm-cat[1] lurks by day among the fronds of the coco-nut trees, and by night makes destructive forays on the fowls of the villagers; and, in order to suck the blood of its victim, inflicts a wound so small as to be almost imperceptible.  The glossy genette[2], the “Civet” of Europeans, is common in the northern province, where the Tamils confine it in cages for the sake of its musk, which they collect from the wooden bars on which it rubs itself.  Edrisi, the Moorish geographer, writing in the twelfth century, enumerates musk as one of the productions then exported from Ceylon.[3]

[Footnote 1:  Paradoxurus typus, F.  Cuv.]

[Footnote 2:  Viverra Indica, Geoffr., Hodgson.]