Tropical Asian Style [antikvár]

IntroductionToward the end of the 1920s, along the sun-dappled southern coast of the island then known as Ceylon, a European aristocrat experienced a moment of intense personal revelation. It was not Count de Mauny-Talvande's first trip to Ceylon. That had been in 1912, when he came as a guest of Sir Thomas Lipton, the tea magnate, and fell in love with the languid tropical atmosphere.After this visit, some time during the First World War, something terrible happened to the Count. Exactly what is unclear, but its effects were sufficient to make him abandon Europe, return to the East, and embark on a restless search for what he called "one spot which, by its sublime beauty, would fulfil my dreams and hold me there for life".It took nearly ten years before his "endless seeking Destiny" brought him to the little fishing village of Welligama, and there, just 50 yards or so offshore, rose a rocky mount covered with lush foliage: a toy island almost, the very embodiment of south-sea-island fantasies, and.to all appearances, quite empty The Count swam across the narrow stretch of water and climbed to the top. "I sat for a long while on a boulder overhanging the sea," he wrote later, "wishing that this island lost in the Indian Ocean were mine; picturing and planning what I should do with it. 1 felt my heart beating with the ovenwhelming desire to create, the pride of creation, and to find in it peace, the nearest thing to happiness. Yes, it would, it must, be the home which I had dreamt of so many years past."And so it became. He changed the name from Galduwa, Singhalese for "rocky island", to Taprobane, the old Greek name for Ceylon, and then proceeded to build on it an extraordinary house. "Not a real house with an interior according to a later resident who was similarly smitten with Taprobane, "but a pavilion whkh would be a continuation of the landscape outside, and from every point of which there would be multiple