The Foundations of Paradise - Arthur C. Clarke [26]
To conserve his strength, he rode a sun-powered tricycle through the pleasure gardens. Dravindra and Jaya preferred to walk, claiming that it was quicker. They were right; but they were able to take short cuts. He climbed very slowly, pausing several times for breath, until he had reached the long corridor of the Lower Gallery, where the Mirror Wall ran parallel to the face of the Rock.
Watched by the usual inquisitive tourists, a young archaeologist from one of the African countries was searching the wall for inscriptions, with the aid of a powerful oblique light. Rajasinghe felt like warning her that the chance of making a new discovery was virtually zero. Paul Sarath had spent twenty years going over every square millimeter of the surface, and the three-volume Yakkagala Graffiti was a monumental work of scholarship that would never be superseded—if only because no other man would ever again be so skilled at reading archaic Taprobani inscriptions.
They had both been young men when Paul had begun his life’s work. Rajasinghe could remember standing at this very spot while the then Deputy Assistant Epigrapher of the Department of Archaeology had traced out the almost indecipherable marks on the yellow plaster, and translated the poems addressed to the beauties on the rock above. After all these centuries, the lines could still strike echoes in the human heart:
I am Tissa, Captain of the Guard.
I came fifty leagues to see the doe-eyed ones,
but they would not speak to me.
Is this kind?
May you remain here for a thousand years,
like the hare which the King of the Gods
painted on the moon. I am the priest Mahinda
from the vihara of Tuparama.
That hope had been partly fulfilled, partly denied. The ladies of the Rock had been standing here for twice the time that the cleric had imagined, and had survived into an age beyond his uttermost dreams. But how few of them were left! Some of the inscriptions referred to “five hundred golden-skinned maidens”; even allowing for considerable poetic license, it was clear that not one tenth of the original frescoes had escaped the ravages of time or the malevolence of men. But the twenty that remained were now safe forever, their beauty stored on countless films and tapes and crystals.
Certainly they had outlasted one proud scribe, who had thought it quite unnecessary to give his name.
I ordered the road to be cleared, so that pilgrims could
see the fair maidens standing on the mountainside.
I am the King.
Over the years, Rajasinghe—himself the bearer of a royal name, and doubtless host to many regal genes—had often thought of those words. They demonstrated so perfectly the ephemeral nature of power, and the futility of ambition. “I am the King.” Ah, but which king? The monarch who had stood on these granite flagstones—scarcely worn then, eighteen hundred years ago—was probably an able and intelligent man; but he failed to conceive that the time could ever come when he would fade into an anonymity as deep as that of his humblest subjects.
The attribution was now lost beyond trace. At least a dozen kings might have inscribed those haughty lines. Some had reigned for years, some only for weeks, and few indeed had died peacefully in their beds. No one would ever know if the king who felt it needless to give his name was Mahatissa II, or Bhatikabhaya, or Vijayakumara III, or Gajabahukagamani, or Candamukhasiva, or Moggallana I, or Kittisena, or Sirisamghabodhi . . . or some other monarch not even recorded in the long and tangled history of Taprobane.
The attendant operating the little elevator was astonished to see his distinguished visitor, and greeted Rajasinghe deferentially. As the cage slowly ascended the full fifteen meters, the visitor remembered how he would