Sigiriya is a column of rock 180 metres above the plains of central Sri Lanka, with the ruins of a fifth-century palace on its flat top. Everything about it was arranged for the person climbing. King Kashyapa took the throne in 477 after having his father walled up alive inside his own irrigation works, then moved the court out of the old capital to this rock. He put a palace on the summit, a city at its foot, and a stairway that entered the rock through the open jaws of a carved stone lion. He held it eighteen years, lost a battle on the plain below, and the rock went back to the monks who had it before.
You come in through the water gardens: bathing pools, boulder gardens and moats laid out symmetrically along a central axis. Their fountains still spurt after hard rain, worked by gravity alone through pipework buried fifteen centuries ago. Then the western face. A spiral of metal stairs is bolted to the cliff, exposed enough that the plain falls away at your shoulder. Halfway up, a sheltered hollow holds the painted maidens, women in ochre and red who have kept their colour for 1,500 years. Beside them runs the mirror wall, plaster polished smooth enough to reflect a passing king. The last stairway lifts off a terrace and takes you straight between two carved paws, each wider across than a car, all that is left of the lion that gave the rock its name, Sinhagiri. The top is a hectare of brick foundations, rock-cut pools and cisterns, the dry-zone forest running to the horizon. For the rock itself you climb Pidurangala next door, a rougher scramble ending on a tilted slab that faces Sigiriya head-on as the sun goes down. The mirror wall is the part people answered. Some 685 verses are scratched into its plaster, most praising the women painted above or confessing the writer's own longing, every one left by someone who had just come up these stairs.