Sigiriya

The afternoon I spent exploring the ancient rock fortress of Sigiriya was an afternoon spent in a living fairytale. The lower grounds and garderns were enchatingly green, full of open spaces, crumbling bricks, twisted trees and bubbling fountains. Little paths wound here and there amoung the ruins and one long, red road runs straight towards the rock. It feels like the kind of place where wandering knights are likley to encounter damsels in distress, enchantresses, or dragons in the moat. There is, in fact, a moat, that one must cross over in order to enter. The stone stairs are full of moss and vines drip from the trees. This is a place one might come to while searching for the Holy Grail. Here, hidden amopung the stones, is a cave with a seat carved into the rock and ancient paintings on the wall. Would the orange-robed monk I imagine meditating there, with the rain dripping off the stone, speak and guide the knight on his quest, or has he taken a vow of silence?

There is a man waiting for me along the path, wanting to sell me a wooden box with four secret compartments and more men in the trees who want to be my guide. I ignore them. I have read a little about the history of the stone and I don't want to know any more. Another day I would be terribly curious about all this, hungry, even, to know more, but today I am not in the mood for facts or for history. I just want to enjoy the moment, at my own pace. I am sick of people talking to me, sick of having my experiences turned into transactions where I pull out my wallet at the end of it all and hand out the cash, and I am not particularly in the mood for company.

I slowly wander upwards, climbing upon ancient stones, stooping under archways in the rock, following old old paths. The rock itself is a fairytale to me and this is my version of the true historical tale:

Once upon a time there was a king who ruled over the central portion of one of the islands of paradise. With the primary wife in his harem he had a son, and later another woman in his harem gave birth to a son, also. The younger son, fearing that he would never inherit the kingdom and urged on by his counsellors, killed his father, the king and took power, exiling his half brother to India.

The younger son lived in fear that the rightful inheritor of the kingdom would raise and army and return so he began building a fortress on the summit of a large rock. The rock stands high in the middle of a large central plain. None may appproach without the army seeing them with plenty of warning. The rock itself is high, and siege of the castle would be almost impossible.

It took the new king seven years to build the fortress, which in those days was both an incredible feat of engineering and of speed. The fountains that were built in the pleasure gardens at the foot of the rock function on anicent principles of gravity and pressure and as such, they still function today, bubbling out into the ancient stone pools.

Although it took the king seven years to build the amazing castle on the rock, it took his half brother ten years to raise an army in southern India and return to Sri Lanka. When the king saw the army approaching across the plain, he seemingly lost all sense of reason and caution, and in a fit of honor, descended from the rock to meet his half brother in battle on the plain. The two armies clashed and fought, but they did not fight for long. The king rode upon an elephant and the elephant took fright. The king lost control of the elephant. The king's army, seeing this, thought that the king was ordering a retreat. They retreated to safely, losing many on the way and leaving the king behind, surrounded by the enemy. When the king saw this and realised that he would be captured by his half brother, he fell on his sword and killed himself.

The new king conquered but distained the palace on the rock, prefering to live elsewhere. The rock became the home, once again, of the monks who used to retreat there to meditate and pray and the castle fell to ruin.

What a glorious thing it must have been to rule the land from that castle on the rock. Even at its base, the view was spectacuilar - all the world stretched out before you in one long smoky plain: the rice paddies and fields, the lakes with water buffalos wallowing in the mud, the symmetry of the fountain gardens and the moat.

There was a spiral staircase to climb in order to get to a wall full of gorgeous paintings. As I climb the iron staircase, I am conscious of each foot upon the stair and of the huge space all around me - the terrible drop and the terrific view. Climbing upswards on that perlious stair, I thought, "This is an adventure."

There is an old man in the picture chamber who takes me past a barricade onto a narrow ledge where there are more crumbling paintings. He is like the caretaker of some hidden tample where knights pass the night to recieve visions. The paintings are all buxom ladies, beautifully depicted, and so often reproduced for tourists that they have become a symbol of Sri Lanka.

Next, I walk along the Mirror Wall. It is about half way up the rock, with a wall between me and the view. The wall is made to shine and reflect through a mixture involving egg whites. The wall is a long sinuous curve, still shining but now etched with graffitti. "What a lot of eggs," I think.

There are monkeys on the stairway ahead of me and so I climb quickly trying to catch up with them and ignore the pain in my muscles (it is only a day since I climbed Sri Pada.) The path opens onto an open plaza before the final stair. A sign reads, "Noise may provoke hornet attacks," and there is a metal cage in which one can hide in the event of an angry swarm. The monkeys have continued climbing. They are now upon the narrow iron stiarcase that leads up to the top of the rock. Two giant lion paws are on either side of the stair. In the past, it is said one had to path through the mouth of the lion at the top to gain entrance to the castle.

I wish I'd had a picnic with me, to spread out on a blanket at the top of the rock and enjoy while I took in the view. As it was, I found myself a comfortable spot on the rocks and looked down at the plain below. I'm not sure how long I stayed there, perhaps half an hour or more. There weren't many tourists. I have heard that there are times when the staircases are choked with people. Perhaps five groups came up to the top while I was there. None walked around the entire summit of the rock. None stayed longer than five minutes.

My muscles trembled as I came down the many stairs, remembering the mountains I had recently climbed. I wandered slowly through the last of the green gardens before crossing the moat and returning to the modern world. I spent the afternoon in the garden of my guesthouse, watching monkies in the trees and dreaming of fairytales.

Sri Pada

During "the season" people traditionally make pilgrimages from all over Sri Lanka, walking slowly towards the great mountain where it is said that the footprint of the Lord Buddha is preserved. In English the mountain is named "Adam's Peak" and Christians are said to find it holy as the earthly location where God deposited Adam (and one presumes Eve as well, although she is never mentioned) when he was banished from Eden. Signs along the way say that Hindus and Muslims also find the mountain holy, but I have found no evidence of their reasons.

I do not travel by foot, but I travel for over twelve hours, using three different modes of transportation, before arriving at the foot of the mountain. There are faster, and more efficient ways of getting there, but I have other errands to run and things to drop off in Colombo. For the last two months, I had been enjoying the beauty of the Southern Sri Lankan coast, but for the first time, I was traveling the interior. To be honest, beaches to me have a lot in common with other beaches world wide. That's not to say that I didn't absolutely love every inch of the beauty on my beach in Madiha, but after the beaches of Australia, the Dominican Republic, Haiti and Thailand, they all begin to blur into a wonderful blend of sun and sand and surf.

Away from the beach, though, Sri Lanka is every bit as beautiful as the lore tells it. It wasn't just the train through the mountains, standing by an open door with the wind in my hair and the green scenery whipping by, white birds rising from rice paddies, flashes of gold on temple roofs, clouds on the peaks; it was the misty mystique of the tea plantations as well. I was on a bus traveling through the tea area when night fell and the world melted away into the fog.

After two trains and a bus, I splurged on private transportation: what in Thailand we call a tuk-tuk, or in Sri Lanka, a three-wheeler. There were a few dubious moments when the male driver made his attempts to persuade me to join him at some whiskey drinking jungle "party" but otherwise, I enjoyed the curvey wild ride on the dark road with emptiness on either side and only the occasional glimpses through the fog of floating mountaintops and mystical waterfalls.

When I woke at 4am, there was a flask of tea on the kitchen table, along with a banana and some crackers. The staff at the guesthouse where I was staying at the foot of the mountain also provided me with a vial of salt for the leeches and a small container of balm for sore muscles. If I had read my guidebook, I would have known that 4am, is far too late to be starting the climb in order to reach the summit by sunrise, but I hadn't really read my guidebook in quite a while, so I woke early and began to prepare.

At first, I thought it was raining. In the darkness, I could hear the sound of water, what I thought was the rain on the roof. So I asked myself, having come all this way to the holy mountain, will I climb in the rain, knowing that I will see nothing but clouds at the cold, wet summit? At 4am, a warm bed is always highly enticing, but since I was already awake and dressed and since I had traveled all that way, I decided, view or not, to try for the top.

I was pleasantly surprised, then, when I left the guesthouse and found the skies clear and full of stars. In the calm of the night, the sound of all the streams and waterfalls nearby had tricked me. Not only was it not raining, but the clear sky promised a fantastic view.

The guidebook does say that if you are a lone woman walking the trail outside of the season, you should take a guide. I hardly even considered it. When there is a large, well marked trail, and one has a dependable headlamp, why would I want a complete stranger walking beside me on my private pilgrimage? It was somewhat thrilling to be alone in the middle of the night, on a trail through the jungle, hiking upwards towards the unknown under the stars.

I could see nothing and I walked slowly so as to enjoy the amazing brightness of the stars above. Now and again, the trail opened onto strange sights, lit by small lights along the path. The first was a large stone archway, towering out of the night, marking the official beginning of the holy trail. It reminded me of a scene from "The Neverending Story," or some other epic fairy tale where one passes from the known world into fantasy. Further on the trail was a shrine in an alclove. I climbed my first set of stairs to discover a whole monastery waiting for me to walk through, utterly deserted and quiet in the dark.

In "the season", which begins with the first full moon of December, people flock to the mountain. There are shops lined up along the way, little wooden stalls selling sweets and tea, where one can stop to rest. I have heard stories of the stairs to the summit so choked with people that one can't move to get up or down. I wandered the woods in utter silence, completely alone.

Partly because of my late starting time and partly because I was walking in wonder (ie: very slowly), it became clear to me very early that I would not make the summit for sunrise. This hardly distressed me. I suppose I could have made a race for the top, but instead I continued my slow toil upwards at my own pace, enjoying the feeling of the night air on my skin and the sounds of the frogs in the woods and the rushing water, and the sight of the stars overhead. The world seemed wrapped in mystery and I was glad to be a part of it.

By the time the sun began lightening the sky, I was high enough up on the mountain to begin enjoying the spectacular views. Since the stairs were becoming steeper, I took plenty of opportunities to stop and enjoy the way light seeped into the scenery, the way the colors changed on the rock face of the cliff opposite me, the things I could begin to see, like the waterfalls and the lakes of clouds far below. It was a gorgeous sunrise, full of yellows and reds and purples and the most brilliant blues. I felt like I watched it for hours. There is something magical about being awake when the world wakes, to watching the landscape unfold around you, as if it were being created anew for your eyes.

The steps up until that point had been old ones, made of earth and stone. They were steep and uneven and crumbling in places. As I came closer to the summit, the path changed to concrete. The more regular steps allowed me to fall into a slow rhythm and I became more optimistic about the climb. I can only imagine how I must look in moments such as that: red in the face from exertion, alone and scruffy, but with the hugest grin on my face, absolutely intoxicated with all the sensations and with the wonder of the world.

It was very soon after sunrise, surprisingly soon, that I began to encounter other people, tourists who were making their way down the mountain after sunrise. There were perhaps ten in all. The first two were women, I imagined them to be a mother and daughter from some Nordic country. They said something pleasant and continued on their way. Then came a whole string of strangely obnoxious people. The next person I encountered was a stout Germanic man, alone, almost racing down the stairs. He was so surprised to see me slowly toiling upwards that he stopped.

"Why are you climbing now?" he asked me. "You have missed all the beauty."

I, too, stopped in surprise and for a moment, I could only stare at him. There we were on these endless steps surrounded by twisted trees and flowering bushes. The birds, just waking in the trees, were calling sweetly and the morning air was cool and clean. There we were, both standing on the edge of nothingness, with all the world spread out below us. The young sun illuminated the lakes below, the ripples of the hills, the red face of the rocks on the mountains, silver flashes of rising clouds.

"There is always more beauty," I replied and kept climbing.

I was still shaking my head when I encountered the next group.

"Why are you climbing?" they asked. "It's finished."

And the next group was the same.

At last, the concrete stairs became even steeper and three iron railings helped me to climb. I knew this was probably the last section of the climb. I went slowly and paused often. My muscles were burning. I had to catch my breath often. From somewhere, a ragged dog joined me and climbed slowly behind me, looking at me with dog eyes every time I stopped.

Just before the last staircase, I rounded a corner and suddenly the whole world opened up to me. Suddenly, the whole earth seemed full of mountaintops and clouds. With the suddenness of it and my fatigue, the beauty went straight through my heart and I found myself unexpectedly close to tears. The wind was in my hair and cold on my skin and I was terribly tired, but I had made it to the top of the world. I faced those last, steep steps and with the dog behind me, finished my climb.

I came to the summit and everything was white and full of wind. It was terribly cold and fresh. Everything felt scrubbed clean and pure. I felt light. There is not much room on a mountaintop, one is forced to leave the extraneous behind. Flags were flapping in the wind as I walked around the shrine at the top - the footprint of the Lord Buddha.

There were some Sri Lankan men living up there, working, bundled up in jackets and warm hats. I sat down on some white stone steps, where dogs were lying in the morning sun. One of the men, dressed all in white, came and stood near me, his white robes flapping in the wind. I don't know how long I sat there, enjoying the warmth of the sun, the cold breeze and the amazing view of mountaintops all around me, shrouded in mist. But there, with the sun in my eyes and a dog curled up beside me, I thought, "Silly man, I missed nothing."