Sigiriya is a column of rock rising 180 metres out of the plains of central Sri Lanka, with the ruins of a fifth-century palace on its flat top, and the climb to it passes a gallery of painted women and goes up between the paws of a giant stone lion. The rock was a fortress and a stage. King Kashyapa seized the throne in 477 after having his father walled up alive, moved his court from the old capital to this rock, and built a palace on the summit and a city at its foot, with water gardens laid out along a central axis: bathing pools, boulder gardens and moats whose fountains still spurt after a hard rain, worked by nothing but gravity and the pressure system his builders laid underground fifteen centuries ago. He ruled here for eighteen years, was defeated in battle, and the rock went back to the monks who had held it before him.
The climb begins through the gardens and then goes up the sheer western face on a spiral of metal steps so exposed that the plains fall away at your shoulder. Halfway up, a sheltered hollow holds the painted maidens, bare-breasted women in rich colours who have survived on the rock for 1,500 years, and beside them the mirror wall, a plastered surface polished so smooth that the king could see himself in it; it is covered in graffiti, most of it love poetry written by visitors between the sixth and thirteenth centuries to the women above. Then the lion: two enormous carved paws flank the final stairway, all that remains of a lion whose body the stairs once entered through, and which gave the rock its name, Sinhagiri. On the summit the palace is foundations and a pool, with the whole plain around you and the forest running to the horizon. The rock is best watched from Pidurangala, the neighbouring outcrop, where a rougher scramble ends at a tilted slab that faces Sigiriya head-on at sunset, with the lion rock going gold above the trees.