grounds were left to decay.
The years had flattened the writing. A kind of visual parity had overtaken the marks, making it difficult to say which inscriptions came last or first, or even to say which stretch of words or symbols went together with which others. Depending on how one grouped them, there were dozens of ways of reading the inscriptions. All of this only compounded his difficulties.
The monk had, some months back, cut a few words into the wall himself, in a blank area near its foot, discreet and permanently shaded from the sun. Mostly this was to test the tactile properties of the rock, the ease or difficulty with which the original inscriptions would have been made; and to see how the wall held a perfectly new inscription, in the hope that this might help him date the layers.
But perhaps he also did it simply to leave a few words behind, like the rest. His translated as “A lesser chronicler.” He wondered how the phrase might someday be overlain, misunderstood possibly, and taken up, perhaps, into something greater by that misunderstanding.
He folded the palm book and placed it, along with the thin, plain stylus, into the sheath he kept at his waist. The day’s transcribing was done. He would add these notes to the rest back at the temple.
For all the complications, he’d managed to give sense to some of the scrawlings. Most seemed addressed to the paintings that covered the rock fortress during Kassapa’s reign, particularly those of women, “long-eyed,” “golden-skinned,” whose essential features, judging by the inscriptions, were stillness and silence:
Those ladies of the mountain
They did not give us
The twitch of an eyelid
The paintings had been done after the fall of Kassapa, around 500, when his deposer, Moggallana, moved the capital back to Anuradhapura. Those living in the villages surrounding Sigiriya would have made the massive rock (and the wall at its base) theirs again, while the palace proper was converted into a monastery.
A few of the paintings, smaller ones, remained along the path spiraling hundreds of feet into the air, ascending the fortress’s edge. They would have survived for their location in the recesses and caves, which shielded them, along with the sentries of that era, from the elements.
There were also other inscriptions Darasa had at least partly interpreted, ones of a more mundane sort: declarations made between lovers, light rhymes, nicknames, and simple identifications (so-and-so from such-and-such). Amid these were the more significant ones, the ones he was after, carrying intimations of life in Sigiriya across the centuries. They dated as far back as 500, around the time of the death of Mahanama, the leading scholar of his era, and the primary compiler of the Great Chronicle (the Mahavamsa), a clerical history of the island covering the thousand years preceding his death.
Some of the graffiti spoke of noble families and their scandals, others of the lack of rice or meat, still others of populist discontent and the deposing of kings—and indeed of the fall of the fortress kingdom itself, to Moggallana, the rightful heir, apparently.
Darasa hoped these records might enrich the commentary he was preparing on the Great Chronicle. More to the point, though, what made the task pressing, was how they might inflect his contribution to the Lesser one (the Culavamsa), the still-living record of the kingdom. It had been accumulating in fits and starts from the time of Mahanama’s death up through to the arrival of the Dutch envoys thirty years ago. That arrival had disrupted the keeping of the record, and a handful of the most senior priests—Darasa, not yet 50, being the youngest of them—was charged with updating it, through a portrait of the most recent decades of the kingdom. When it finally arrived, he would say to himself sometimes, the light of the past, even the very distant past, must change the complexion of the present.
Interpreting the inscriptions
The years had flattened the writing. A kind of visual parity had overtaken the marks, making it difficult to say which inscriptions came last or first, or even to say which stretch of words or symbols went together with which others. Depending on how one grouped them, there were dozens of ways of reading the inscriptions. All of this only compounded his difficulties.
The monk had, some months back, cut a few words into the wall himself, in a blank area near its foot, discreet and permanently shaded from the sun. Mostly this was to test the tactile properties of the rock, the ease or difficulty with which the original inscriptions would have been made; and to see how the wall held a perfectly new inscription, in the hope that this might help him date the layers.
But perhaps he also did it simply to leave a few words behind, like the rest. His translated as “A lesser chronicler.” He wondered how the phrase might someday be overlain, misunderstood possibly, and taken up, perhaps, into something greater by that misunderstanding.
He folded the palm book and placed it, along with the thin, plain stylus, into the sheath he kept at his waist. The day’s transcribing was done. He would add these notes to the rest back at the temple.
For all the complications, he’d managed to give sense to some of the scrawlings. Most seemed addressed to the paintings that covered the rock fortress during Kassapa’s reign, particularly those of women, “long-eyed,” “golden-skinned,” whose essential features, judging by the inscriptions, were stillness and silence:
Those ladies of the mountain
They did not give us
The twitch of an eyelid
The paintings had been done after the fall of Kassapa, around 500, when his deposer, Moggallana, moved the capital back to Anuradhapura. Those living in the villages surrounding Sigiriya would have made the massive rock (and the wall at its base) theirs again, while the palace proper was converted into a monastery.
A few of the paintings, smaller ones, remained along the path spiraling hundreds of feet into the air, ascending the fortress’s edge. They would have survived for their location in the recesses and caves, which shielded them, along with the sentries of that era, from the elements.
There were also other inscriptions Darasa had at least partly interpreted, ones of a more mundane sort: declarations made between lovers, light rhymes, nicknames, and simple identifications (so-and-so from such-and-such). Amid these were the more significant ones, the ones he was after, carrying intimations of life in Sigiriya across the centuries. They dated as far back as 500, around the time of the death of Mahanama, the leading scholar of his era, and the primary compiler of the Great Chronicle (the Mahavamsa), a clerical history of the island covering the thousand years preceding his death.
Some of the graffiti spoke of noble families and their scandals, others of the lack of rice or meat, still others of populist discontent and the deposing of kings—and indeed of the fall of the fortress kingdom itself, to Moggallana, the rightful heir, apparently.
Darasa hoped these records might enrich the commentary he was preparing on the Great Chronicle. More to the point, though, what made the task pressing, was how they might inflect his contribution to the Lesser one (the Culavamsa), the still-living record of the kingdom. It had been accumulating in fits and starts from the time of Mahanama’s death up through to the arrival of the Dutch envoys thirty years ago. That arrival had disrupted the keeping of the record, and a handful of the most senior priests—Darasa, not yet 50, being the youngest of them—was charged with updating it, through a portrait of the most recent decades of the kingdom. When it finally arrived, he would say to himself sometimes, the light of the past, even the very distant past, must change the complexion of the present.
Interpreting the inscriptions
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