A traveller on a night flight from London or Paris to Colombo's Katunayake Airport is still an hour away from the delights and troubles of Sri Lanka when the dark sea below suddenly commands attention. Dozens of little lights wink from horizon to horizon in a rough north–south alignment. They are the kerosene lamps, Coleman lanterns, and occasional electric bulbs run from the generators of the island chiefs of the Republic of Maldives. The greater glow is from Male, the capital. Many travellers backtrack from Sri Lanka for a week at one of the lovely resort islands; many others arrive direct at Male by charter flight. During Europe's winter these tourists find an ideal climate, with warm weather, reasonable humidity, breezes stirring the coconut palms, and breakers crashing over the coral reefs that ring the atolls' shallow lagoons. In the few villages that tourists are permitted to visit (for the government carefully guards its citizens from contact with them), they will find an idyllic setting, exceptional in this part of Asia. The village streets are clean, swept daily with palm-frond brooms. Along them lie houses built with the same palm branches, and boatyards with coconut-wood craft under construction. In the lagoons, fishermen cast their nets by hand. The islands are superb scenery, and it is hard to imagine them as the source of the slave trade's shell money.

The independent republic has an unusual “landscape,” if that is the proper term. Just over a thousand islands (less than 200 inhabited) in nineteen atolls lie stretched out for 475 miles on a north–south axis.