“Kalidasa's great war elephant, caparisoned with the royal banners, turned aside to avoid a patch of marshy ground. The defenders thought that the king was retreating. Their morale broke; they scattered, as the Chronicles record, like chaff from the winnowing fan.”
“Kalidasa was found on the battlefield, dead by his own hand. Malgara became king. And Yakkagala was abandoned to the jungle, not to be discovered again for seventeen hundred years.”
5. Through the Telescope
“My secret vice,” Rajasinghe called it, with wry amusement but also with regret. It had been years since he had climbed to the summit of Yakkagala, and though he could fly there whenever he wished, that did not give the same feeling of achievement. To do it the easy way by-passed the most fascinating architectural details of the ascent; no-one could hope to understand the mind of Kalidasa without following his footsteps all the way from Pleasure Garden to aerial Palace.
But there was a substitute which could give an ageing man considerable satisfaction. Years ago he had acquired a compact and powerful twenty-centimetre telescope; through it he could roam the entire western wall of the Rock, retracing the path he had followed to the summit so many times in the past. When he peered through the binocular eyepiece, he could easily imagine that he was hanging in mid-air, close enough to the sheer granite wall to reach out and touch it.
In the late afternoon, as the rays of the westering sun reached beneath the rock overhang that protected them, Rajasinghe would visit the frescoes, and pay tribute to the ladies of the court. Though he loved them all, he had his favourites; sometimes he would talk silently to them, using the most archaic words and phrases that he knew-well aware of the fact that his oldest Taprobani lay a thousand years in their future.