The Foundations of Paradise - Arthur C. Clarke [16]
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 rediscovery 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, that 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.
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 an 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 meters 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.
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. Few of the inscriptions were in alphabets that Morgan could recognize, 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 centuries. 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 meters 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.
For the first time, Morgan could appreciate one of the chief mysteries of Yakkagala. It was not how the frescoes were painted—a scaffolding of bamboo could have taken care of that problem—but why. Once they were completed, no one could ever have seen them properly. From the gallery immediately beneath, they were hopelessly foreshortened, and from the base of the Rock,