Sigiriya

Sigiriya is a rock that a king made into a city: in 477 Kasyapa, who had killed his father and feared his brother, moved his court from Anuradhapura to the top of a two-hundred-metre plug of granite in the middle of the jungle and built there, in eighteen years, a palace with pools, a mirror wall polished so he could see himself walk, a gallery of painted maidens rising out of clouds, a staircase that entered the rock through the mouth of a lion — the paws are all that is left —, and, at the foot, a garden of moats and symmetrical pools whose fountains, fed by gravity, still play in the rains fifteen centuries later. His brother came; the king lost; the monks took the rock back; and the jungle kept the rest until the nineteenth century found it again.

The traveller comes at seven, when the gate opens, and walks the axis: through the water gardens while the light is flat, into the boulder gardens where the monks' caves have drip-lines cut over their doors, up the terraces to the frescoes and the mirror wall with its thousand-year-old graffiti in praise of the ladies, to the lion's paws and up the last stair to the summit, where the pools are still full and the plain is all sky; comes down before the heat, and, in the afternoon, drives to Dambulla for the five caves of painted Buddhas; and, at five, climbs Pidurangala, the rock across the trees, for the sunset that has Sigiriya in it.

The Guide's honesty: Sigiriya is the country's most visited site and its ticket is the country's most expensive — go at opening or at four to have the summit without a queue, and buy the ticket for the museum too, which explains the water; the climb is a thousand two hundred steps on iron stairs bolted to the rock — not for vertigo, and not in the noon sun; the wasps on the cliff are real and the signs asking for silence are for them; the frescoes may not be photographed and the guards mean it; the elephants of the surrounding forest cross the roads at dusk — drive slowly, and stay in the car; and Pidurangala is the better sunset and the cheaper ticket, which the locals will tell you with a smile.