On setting out
from Kandelema just after sunrise, the vapour rising from the jungle paints the
landscape in a series of misty layers, along the dirt track to join the jungle
road, to find precisely that which is not visible from the observation decks of
Kandelama A city, not a modern buzzing metropolis, but an ancient city, Sigiriya,
situated in plane view of from the hotel, but invisible from the distance,
despite it being situated on the top of a large rock, some one hundred and
eighty metres high.
Turning off
the jungle road into a clearing in the trees to a very ordered environment. A perfectly
straight water channel, a moat some ten metres wide, and a wall that is
inpenetrable, built of large stone blocks, set at a batter, sloping back from
the moat. A giant standing Buddha Statue marks the end of an east-west vista
framed by the trees, the vista then leads over the moat across a bridge and
into the remains of a walled city. The same sloping walls, that frame steps
that form a path up through green terraces has very much the feeling of a Mayan
pyramid complex as seen in books and Television documentaries, as I have not
yet been to South America. According to UNESCO the city is dated around the
fifth Century AD, although the organization acknowledges that the site has not
been sufficiently excavated. A bit of research places the city contemporary
with the classic period of the Mayan civilization, interesting…
Much of the city has been reclaimed by nature,
large trees stand in courtyards and cisterns, grasses grow on the top of the
walls, and it takes a bit of imagination to visualize this as a bustling city,
the buildings were most probably simple open structures timber posts set atop
the stone walls, probably coconut, and pitched ‘cadjan’ roof construction, a
thatched roof made from coconut leaves bound together, to throw off the monsoon
rains.
Climbing through the terraces and courtyards, the
city becomes more and more spectacular walls frame a walkway that hugs the
profile of the rock, until arriving at a plaza known as the lion’s head,
climbing is hot work, and the humidity means that everything is wet. The plaza
of the Lion’s head faces true North, in fact that whole city is set on an
orthogonal grid aligned to true North, the plaza is dominated by the huge
sculpted lion’s paws that must be at least three metres high, the lion symbolic
of the Sinhalese civilization, indigenous to Sri Lanka since fifth century BC,
Sinha meaning lion, Sinhala translating to lion people, this is Architecture in
the purest sense.
A flight of
steps rises between the lion’s paws, to lead to a one sided steel walkway that
is set into the face of the rock, depressions in the rock reveal just how
treacherous the climb was before the addition of the walkway, and why it makes
sense to build a fortress on top of the rock if you are trying to avoid being
invaded. The climb up the face of the rock, switching back and forward along
the steel walkways arrives at a pair of spiral stairs, one up and one down, the
climb up the spiral arrives at a platform halfway up the rock, within an
inaccessible rocky shelter in the vertical wall of the western face are rock
paintings which have brought universal acclaim to the site of Sigiriya - 'The
Maidens of the Clouds'. UNESCO. How these paintings were made in such an
inaccessible location is something of a mystery.
Making the
reverse journey on the second spiral, and continuing the climb along the face
of the rock to arrive at the rock fortress, which will probably be familiar to
those who grew up in the 1980s watching music videos, as this is the location
featured in Duran Duran’s ‘Save a Prayer’ video, the stone walls and terraces
and pools set at the same orientation as the city on the ground, at the top,
the stone bases of the great hall with the sockets to receive the timber
structure, and the panorama...Amazing! Breathtaking! no amount of superlatives can describe this. It is unbroken jungle in every direction,
the only mark of human hands being the axis that terminates with the giant
Buddha standing in a clearing in the trees.
