The Monster Hunter Read Online Free

traditional Sinhalese town, with mud roads and hastily erected but comfortable huts and houses. Many merchants were simply selling the fruits picked directly from the trees or the meat that had been caught or fishedfor the previous day so that a trader rarely had the same product for more than a season. Very few people spoke English in the village and animals were free to wander as unmolested through the streets as any man. Merchants sold fruit and vegetables directly on the streets and there were numerous shrines to gods and goddesses garlanded with flowers and laden with edible offerings, watched over by the silent, smiling priests who tended them. In short, it was a colourful and rich environment that seemed a part of the landscape around it. Colombo, however, was not such a place and had already lost Ceylon’s native magic.
    The port at Colombo was protected from the sea by a giant block wall and the town beyond had grown to match the tastes of the many British and European merchants who had found it their temporary, maybe permanent, home and place of business. Empire builders, being what they were, wanted the rest of the world to know exactly what they did, as they would do the same activity whether the goods were in season or not. It was this egotism that had the warehouses of the Colombo port gaily painted with large signs announcing to all the owner’s name and the product in which they dealt. The gaily painted warehouses belonged mostly to tea merchants but there were spice merchants, rubber manufacturers, shipwrights and coal merchants as well. Tall-sailed ships, smoking paddle steamers and fast tea clippers thronged the busy harbour, loading and unloading their cargo and passengers.
    Ben had been sent to the port with a delivery of tea, riding in the back of a cart surrounded by crates of the fragrant cargo. The inhabitants of this strange town were as much European as they were Sinhalese and this clashing of cultures was being won by the richer merchants whose numbers were growing by the year, their clothes were drabber in colour than the merchantsBen had grown up with and the fabric was heavier and hard wearing. Many locals of Ceylon had found work in the port but the sailors who arrived daily were generally pale skinned. Ben hadn’t seen so much red and blond hair in all his life and he turned excitedly, hoping to get a glimpse of every hue and shade. Few women were present at the docks but those that were stood out like the most beautiful of birds, their clothes so much bigger and brighter than the men’s, their hair so much fuller and their skin so much paler. He found himself smiling at so many people, but every face that caught his eye turned away to be lost in the crowd.
    The crowd moved as a single creature, it was so full of people. It grew thicker as it got closer to the quays where the ships were docked and the cart slowed till it was barely moving at all. Beyond the crates Ben could hear the anger of the driver rising as he constantly had to instruct people to move from his path in angry, untranslatable Sinhalese but soon they found their destination and the cart finally stopped before the warehouse of ‘The First Tea Company’, a merchant that predominantly supplied British troops with the brew that kept them going through the arduous days of battle around the globe; although from what the officers at the hospital had said, the products of the FTC were more likely to be drunk by the shirkers and objectors of the world rather than the fighters. The driver appeared before Ben to help him down on to the cobbles along with his small kit bag. This Ben had filled with his meagre belongings – the two precious books as well as some jewellery of his mother’s, carefully wrapped and accompanied by a letter of ownership, written and signed by a British officer, in case he was questioned about his possession of them. The driver was a burly Sinhalese employee of the tea plantation