The Knuckles Mountain Range takes its name from its skyline: a line of peaks northeast of Kandy that stand up like the knuckles of a clenched fist. It fits every one of Sri Lanka's climate zones into a single block of hills. At its feet is hot lowland jungle; on the tops, frost silvers the high grass on cold mornings. The walking is on ridge routes that take you up through dripping montane forest, where moss and lichen hang from every branch and tree ferns crowd the path. Nothing up there is ever dry. Leeches come with the wet, and the weather can turn on you from sun to driving rain inside an hour. Higher still the trees give out and the trail breaks onto open crests above the cloud, with the jagged peaks lined up against the sky ahead of you.
At Riverston the ground simply stops. A grassy lip called Mini World's End hangs over a hazy plain that falls away hundreds of metres below your boots, the range's own quieter version of the drop at Horton Plains. The best hour is the last one. As the sun goes down, cloud pools in the valleys until the ridges stand out of it like islands, and the western sky burns orange behind the fist. The villages in the range still smell of cardamom. For much of the last century the spice was farmed on cleared ground deep inside the forest, with the shade trees thinned out across large tracts. Then the range was protected, and the trees began closing over the clearings again. What that forest holds is the reason the protection came. Dozens of reptiles and amphibians here live nowhere but this massif, and one of them, a ground-dwelling pygmy lizard, was not described until recent years. Another, the leaf-nosed lizard, carries a soft leaf-shaped horn on the snout of the male. What holds them is the wet forest now growing back over the cardamom.