Page:On the Coromandel Coast.djvu/84

 road, reflecting sky and landscape, the gorgeous colours of the sunset, the groves of palms, the handsome trees, and the skimming gulls and curlews. The moan of the surf upon the shore becomes audible, and St. Thome is reached with its silent old streets, its big cathedral of modern growth, and its pleasant little bungalows, nestling confidently upon the beach with the waves beating up to the very compound walls.

St. Thome was the name the Portuguese merchants gave to their settlement in the ancient town of Mylapore, the Maliapha Emporium of Ptolemy. Here, it is said, St. Thomas was buried, A.D. 68. Mylapore was a flourishing city then, with a prince to rule over it. Ships from many countries far and near put in with their merchandise, bringing pilgrims to the tomb of St. Thomas. Among these were said to be the ambassadors of Alfred the Great (A.D. 883). Thither, without doubt, came the great traveller Marco Polo in the thirteenth century, in whose time the town was prosperous. The narrow streets still remain, many of them too narrow for a carriage to pass along. They were laid out when the palanquin was the chief means of locomotion for the wealthy; and Marco Polo, borne on the shoulders of the fishermen bearers, must have passed by those deserted ways down which I gazed. The houses that line the streets are small, and many of them in a ruinous state. The wooden rafters and beams decayed and the roofs fell in. As they fell so they seem to remain in the present day, a symbol of the decay that has overtaken the trade of the port.

Early in the sixteenth century the Portuguese appeared on the Coromandel Coast. Tempted by the anchorage in the Adyar, they brought their little ships over the bar into the backwater. They obtained leave to settle at Mylapore, and were granted a lease of a part of the town that touched the sea. Warehouses and dwellings rose