Sigiriya

A few days a year, when enough rain has fallen, the fountains in the gardens at the foot of Sigiriya start working on their own. There is no pump anywhere in the system and never was. Water collects, moves through stone conduits laid roughly fifteen centuries ago, builds pressure as it drops, and pushes up through perforated limestone plates set into the garden floor. Then it stops when the water runs out.

That is worth pausing on. The palace above is a ruin, the frescoes have mostly flaked away, and the staircase has been replaced with steel. But the plumbing still does exactly what it was designed to do, unattended, on the same physics.

A Rock Left Standing When Everything Around It Wore Away

Sigiriya is not a hill. It is a volcanic plug — magma that hardened in the throat of a volcano, exposed when the softer rock around it eroded off. It rises about a hundred and eighty metres straight out of flat country and its top is a plateau.

King Kashyapa took the throne from his father in the late fifth century and, according to the Sri Lankan chronicles, moved the capital here because he expected his exiled brother to come back for it. But he did not just build a refuge on a rock. He laid out a whole planned landscape around it: symmetrical water gardens, boulder gardens, terraces, pools, moats and ramparts, with the path to the summit running through all of it. Anyone approaching him walked a designed route for a long time before they got anywhere near him.

The Elephant That Turned

Around 495 the brother did come back, with an army, and the two forces met at the foot of the rock.

The chronicles describe Kashyapa riding out on his elephant, meeting a patch of marsh, and the animal turning aside to go around it. His troops behind him read the turn as retreat and broke. Left alone in front of an army, the king is said to have drawn his own dagger and cut his throat. The chroniclers were writing for the winning side, so the details deserve some suspicion. What is not disputed is that Kashyapa died there and the capital came down off the rock the same year.

Afterwards Sigiriya became a Buddhist monastery, which it remained for centuries, and then it was mostly left alone. British officers surveying the interior in the nineteenth century recorded it and archaeological work followed.

A Visitors' Book Written On A Wall

Partway up, along the western face, there is a long wall built against the rock, plastered and polished until it reflected — the Mirror Wall.

Sheltered in a pocket above it are the paintings Sigiriya is famous for: female figures emerging from cloud, of which around twenty survive out of what was probably a much larger scheme. And on the wall opposite them, people who came to look wrote things.

The inscriptions were scratched into the polish mostly between the eighth and tenth centuries, and they are not idle graffiti. They are short poems, metrical and rhymed, written by visitors reacting to the figures on the rock face — and to each other, since some of them answer verses written by earlier visitors. More than a thousand have been deciphered. People signed them, gave their home towns, sometimes their occupations.

So there exists a large body of first-hand writing by ordinary medieval Sri Lankans on the subject of visiting a tourist attraction. Not court chronicle, not religious text, nobody's propaganda: a clerk from somewhere else, writing down what he thought of a painting. Writing on the wall is now firmly prohibited, which is the only reasonable rule and also slightly funny, given that the wall's chief value is that people ignored it for two hundred years.

Now

Sigiriya became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1982 and is the most visited archaeological site in Sri Lanka. The climb is done on steel staircases bolted to the rock, and on busy days there are queues on them.

The pressures are the usual modern ones: humidity and breath in the fresco pocket, wear on the stone, and the sheer number of feet. Then there is the lion. The site's name refers to it, and a stairway once passed through the mouth of an enormous lion figure built at the base of the final ascent. The head and body are long gone. The two paws are still there, either side of the steps, so everyone who climbs Sigiriya today walks up through a head that is not there.