The Fountains of Paradise

Morgan was never one to waste time. Slacks and sweater were on in less than a minute, but the careful checking of his footwear took considerably longer. Though he had done no serious climbing for years, he always carried a pair of strong, light-weight boots; in his profession, he often found them essential. He had already closed the door of his room when he had a sudden afterthought.

For a moment he stood hesitantly in the corridor; then he smiled and shrugged his shoulders. It wouldn't do any harm, and one never knew…

Once more back in the room, Morgan unlocked his suitcase and took out a small flat box, about the size and shape of a pocket calculator. He checked the battery charge, tested the manual over-ride, then clipped it to the steel buckle of his strong synthetic waist-belt. Now he was indeed ready to enter Kalidasa's haunted kingdom, and to face whatever demons it held.

The sun rose, pouring welcome warmth upon his back as Morgan passed through the gap in the massive rampart that formed the outer defences of the fortress. Before him, spanned by a narrow stone bridge, were the still waters of the great moat, stretching in a perfectly straight line for half a kilometre on either side. A small flotilla of swans sailed hopefully towards him through the lilies, then dispersed with ruffled feathers when it was clear that he had no food to offer. On the far side of the bridge he came to a second, smaller wall and climbed the narrow flight of stairs cut through it; and there before him were the Pleasure Gardens, with the sheer face of the Rock looming beyond them.

The fountains along the axis of the gardens rose and fell together with a languid rhythm, as if they were breathing slowly in unison. There was not another human being in sight; he had the whole expanse of Yakkagala to himself. The fortress-city could hardly have been lonelier even during the seventeen hundred years when the jungle had overwhelmed it, between the death of Kalidasa and its re-discovery by nineteenth-century archaeologists.

Morgan walked past the line of fountains, feeling their spray against his skin, and stopped once to admire the beautifully carved stone guttering – obviously original – which carried the overflow. He wondered how the old-time hydraulic engineers lifted the water to drive the fountains, and what pressure differences they could handle; these soaring, vertical jets must have been truly astonishing to those who first witnessed them.

And now ahead was a steep flight of granite steps, their treads so uncomfortably narrow that they could barely accommodate Morgan's boots. Did the people who built this extraordinary place really have such tiny feet, he wondered? Or was it a clever ruse of the architect, to discourage unfriendly visitors? It would certainly be difficult for soldiers to charge up this sixty-degree slope, on steps that seemed to have been made for midgets.

A small platform, then another identical flight of steps, and Morgan found himself on a long, slowly ascending gallery cut into the lower flanks of the Rock. He was now more than fifty metres above the surrounding plain, but the view was completely blocked by a high wall coated with smooth, yellow plaster. The rock above him overhung so much that he might almost have been walking along a tunnel, for only a narrow band of sky was visible overhead.

The plaster of the wall looked completely new and unworn; it was almost impossible to believe that the masons had left their work two thousand years ago. Here and there, however, the gleaming, mirror-flat surface was scarred with scratched messages, where visitors had made their usual bids for immortality. Very few of the inscriptions were in alphabets that Morgan could recognise, and the latest date he noticed was 1931; thereafter, presumably, the Department of Archaeology had intervened to prevent such vandalism. Most of the graffiti were in flowing, rounded Taprobani; Morgan recalled from the previous night's entertainment that many were poems, dating back to the second and third century. For a little while after the death of Kalidasa, Yakkagala had known its first brief spell as a tourist attraction, thanks to the still lingering legends of the accursed king.

Halfway along the stone gallery, Morgan came to the now locked door of the little elevator leading to the famous frescoes, twenty metres directly above. He craned his head to see them, but they were obscured by the platform of the visitors' viewing cage, clinging like a metal bird's-nest to the outward-leaning face of the rock. Some tourists, Rajasinghe had told him, took one look at the dizzy location of the frescoes, and decided to satisfy themselves with photographs.