It is still dark when you start walking. The forest is loud with insects, and somewhere a peacock is calling. Your guide’s torch picks out the old stone steps of Pidurangala, the monastery rock that stands opposite Sigiriya. Twenty minutes of climbing, a scramble over a boulder, and then you are on top, sitting on warm granite as the sky turns from violet to pink.
And there it is. Sigiriya rises straight out of the jungle like the prow of a ship, the morning mist pooling around its base. It doesn’t look real. Fifteen hundred years ago, a king named Kashyapa looked at that same rock and decided to build his palace on top of it.
A palace in the sky
By the time the gates open you are at the bottom of the rock, ahead of the tour buses. The path leads you through water gardens laid out in the fifth century, among the oldest landscaped gardens in the world. In the rainy season their stone fountains still work, fed by the same underground channels the king’s engineers designed.
Halfway up, a spiral staircase brings you to a sheltered gallery. Painted on the rock are the Sigiriya maidens: women with flowers in their hands and jewels in their hair, their colours still glowing after all these centuries. You will find yourself whispering without knowing why.
A thousand years ago, travellers stood exactly where you’re standing and wrote down how they felt. You will understand them completely.
Just beyond is the Mirror Wall, once polished so smoothly the king could see his reflection. Visitors began scratching verses into it more than a thousand years ago, little poems to the painted maidens, to beauty and to longing. It is the oldest guestbook in Sri Lanka.
By ten o’clock the heat is rising and the crowds are arriving. You are walking back through the gardens, a little breathless and full of something that feels a lot like wonder. The rest of the day is yours to do nothing at all.
