was arduous and uncertain work. As was simply collecting them. He’d only begun to account for the many inscriptions carried by the architecture of the court and palace above. So he ascended again. This was his third trip. The monk left the mirror-wall behind and edged his way along the path. In the guard stations he passed several renderings of the Buddha, in bleeding shades of red, orange, and yellow. The path narrowed as it wrapped around the interior face of the fortress, which was hidden from both the entrance to the court and the nearby townships, partly by the thick forest at its base.
Further toward the top, the cliff turned sheer and the path narrow, in some places reducing to mere foot-holes. The shallow steps ascended at a radical angle, as a great height had to be scaled in the smallest distance. He leaned against the rock. At this height, already two hundred feet from the forest floor, the winds were muscular, death-dealing. He’d knotted the loose fabric of his robe to give the currents less to work with.
In previous eras, rope bridges had crisscrossed this part of the mountain, connecting various levels of the fortress on the exposed top, where the palace lay, to the plateaus, embankments, and interior caves below. As Darasa stepped from foot-hole to foot-hole, pressing his weight against the cliff, he wondered, as every person who had ever got to the palace above must have, how many would have lost their footing, been snatched by the winds, toppled from the bridges, only to expire in the coconut palms and shrubs below.
The sun descended from its apex just as he reached the top. The palace grounds had stood unoccupied for over four hundred years. It was a site for research only now, and so far, beyond the reach of the Europeans. Just as Kandy marked the southern stronghold of the kingdom, Anuradhapura, though more vulnerable, did in the north. Sigiriya lay safely between the two. It left Darasa free, in a less fraught space, to make sense of things, which was what monks of his rank chiefly did.
Scattered throughout the grounds were staircases of varying widths leading only into the sky, the surrounding structures long ago having been dispersed by the elements. Several well-preserved buildings with broad balconies lined the plateau’s far edge, each with eccentrically shallow stairs: sixty of them rising just ten feet.
The largest building, the palace proper, stood to the right, along the southern edge of the plateau, five stories high, each floor narrower than the one below. The inner wall had long ago collapsed, leaving behind a cross-sectional view.
The interior was mostly debris. The outer wall, facing over the cliff’s edge, was in better condition, but large patches of it had fallen away, leaving gaps of a leafy green—forest surrounded the great rock out to the horizon—against the pale gold of the remaining stone.
The vast quantities of rock had been quarried miles away and brought up the sheer walls by an elaborate system of pulleys. All supplies would have been carried on the backs of servants, dragging many to their deaths. The king himself would only occasionally be shepherded from the palace to the long rectangular pools at the foot of the rock, where members of the extended court, and further out, the priesthood, resided.
The walls were engraved with lions and other animals, alongside geometric patterns and what seemed an uninterpreted language. Darasa entered the ruins to finish recording these markings. They might shift the meaning, he thought, of King Kassapa’s description in the Chronicle, and perhaps send a sort of interpretive ripple through the ages down to the current regime and Darasa’s own king, Rajasingha II.
He climbed to the third floor of an adjoining structure to take down the exterior markings on the palace walls. The angular inscriptions seemed to him clearly more than decorative, patterned as they were with something like a syntax, though not of a language like
Further toward the top, the cliff turned sheer and the path narrow, in some places reducing to mere foot-holes. The shallow steps ascended at a radical angle, as a great height had to be scaled in the smallest distance. He leaned against the rock. At this height, already two hundred feet from the forest floor, the winds were muscular, death-dealing. He’d knotted the loose fabric of his robe to give the currents less to work with.
In previous eras, rope bridges had crisscrossed this part of the mountain, connecting various levels of the fortress on the exposed top, where the palace lay, to the plateaus, embankments, and interior caves below. As Darasa stepped from foot-hole to foot-hole, pressing his weight against the cliff, he wondered, as every person who had ever got to the palace above must have, how many would have lost their footing, been snatched by the winds, toppled from the bridges, only to expire in the coconut palms and shrubs below.
The sun descended from its apex just as he reached the top. The palace grounds had stood unoccupied for over four hundred years. It was a site for research only now, and so far, beyond the reach of the Europeans. Just as Kandy marked the southern stronghold of the kingdom, Anuradhapura, though more vulnerable, did in the north. Sigiriya lay safely between the two. It left Darasa free, in a less fraught space, to make sense of things, which was what monks of his rank chiefly did.
Scattered throughout the grounds were staircases of varying widths leading only into the sky, the surrounding structures long ago having been dispersed by the elements. Several well-preserved buildings with broad balconies lined the plateau’s far edge, each with eccentrically shallow stairs: sixty of them rising just ten feet.
The largest building, the palace proper, stood to the right, along the southern edge of the plateau, five stories high, each floor narrower than the one below. The inner wall had long ago collapsed, leaving behind a cross-sectional view.
The interior was mostly debris. The outer wall, facing over the cliff’s edge, was in better condition, but large patches of it had fallen away, leaving gaps of a leafy green—forest surrounded the great rock out to the horizon—against the pale gold of the remaining stone.
The vast quantities of rock had been quarried miles away and brought up the sheer walls by an elaborate system of pulleys. All supplies would have been carried on the backs of servants, dragging many to their deaths. The king himself would only occasionally be shepherded from the palace to the long rectangular pools at the foot of the rock, where members of the extended court, and further out, the priesthood, resided.
The walls were engraved with lions and other animals, alongside geometric patterns and what seemed an uninterpreted language. Darasa entered the ruins to finish recording these markings. They might shift the meaning, he thought, of King Kassapa’s description in the Chronicle, and perhaps send a sort of interpretive ripple through the ages down to the current regime and Darasa’s own king, Rajasingha II.
He climbed to the third floor of an adjoining structure to take down the exterior markings on the palace walls. The angular inscriptions seemed to him clearly more than decorative, patterned as they were with something like a syntax, though not of a language like
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