The Elephant Throne had changed little in three thousand years, but never before had it supported the weight of so alien a visitor. As the Starholmer stared into the south, It compared the half-kilometre-wide column soaring from the mountain peak with the feats of engineering It had seen on other worlds. For such a young race, this was indeed impressive. Though it seemed always on the point of toppling from the sky, it had stood now for fifteen centuries.
Not, of course, in its present form. The first hundred kilometres was now a vertical city-still occupied at some of its widely-spaced levels – through which the sixteen sets of tracks had often carried a million passengers a day. Only two of those tracks were operating now; in a few hours the Starholmer and Its escorts would be racing up that huge, fluted column, on the way back to the Ring City that encircled the globe.
The Holmer everted Its eyes to give telescopic vision, and slowly scanned the zenith. Yes, there it was – hard to see by day, but easy by night when the sunlight streaming past the shadow of Earth still blazed upon it. The thin, shining band that split the sky into two hemispheres was a whole world in itself, where half-a-billion humans had opted for permanent zero-gravity life.
And up there beside Ring City was the starship that had carried the envoy and all the other Companions of the Hive across the interstellar gulfs. Even now it was being readied for departure – not with any sense of urgency, but several years ahead of schedule, in preparation for the next six-hundred-year lap of its journey. That would represent no time at all to the Starholmer, of course, for It would not reconjugate until the end of the voyage, but then It might well face the greatest challenge of Its long career. For the first time a Starprobe had been destroyed – or at least silenced – soon after it had entered a solar system. Perhaps it had at last made contact with the mysterious Hunters of the Dawn, who had left their marks upon so many worlds, so inexplicably close to the Beginning itself. If the Starholmer had been capable of awe, or of fear, It would have known both, as It contemplated its future, six hundred years hence.
But now It was on the snow-dusted summit of Yakkagala, facing mankind's pathway to the stars. It summoned the children to Its side (they always understood when It really wished to be obeyed) and pointed to the mountain in the south.
“You know perfectly well,” It said, with an exasperation that was only partly feigned, “that Earthport One was built two thousand years later than this ruined palace.” The children all nodded in solemn agreement. “Then why,” asked the Starholmer, tracing the line from the zenith down to the summit of the mountain, “why do you call that column – the Tower of Kalidasa?”
AFTERWORD
SOURCES AND ACKOWLEDGMENTS
The writer of historical fiction has a peculiar responsibility to his readers, especially when he is dealing with unfamiliar times and places. He should not distort facts or events, when they are known; and when he invents them, as he is often compelled to do, it is his duty to indicate the dividing line between imagination and reality.
The writer of science fiction has the same responsibility, squared. I hope that these notes will not only discharge that obligation but also add to the reader's enjoyment.
Taprobane and Ceylon
For dramatic reasons, I have made three trifling changes to the geography of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). I have moved the island eight hundred kilometres south, so that it straddles the equator – as indeed it did twenty million years ago, and may some day do again. At the moment it lies between six and ten degrees north.
In addition, I have doubled the height of the Sacred Mountain, and moved it closer to “Yakkagala”. For both places exist, very much as I have described them.
Sri Pada, or Adam's Peak, is a striking cone-shaped mountain sacred to the Buddhists, the Muslims, the Hindus and the Christians, and bearing a small temple on its summit. Inside the temple is a stone slab with a depression which, though two metres long, is reputed to be the footprint of the Buddha.
Every year, for many centuries, thousands of pilgrims have made the long climb to the 2,240-metre-high summit. The ascent is no longer dangerous for there are two stairways (which must surely be the longest in the world) to the very top. I have climbed once, at the instigation of the New Yorker's Jeremy Bernstein (see his Experiencing Science), and my legs were paralysed for several days afterwards. But it was worth the effort, for we were lucky enough to see the beautiful and awe-inspiring spectacle of the peak's shadow at dawn – a perfectly symmetrical cone visible only for the few minutes after sunrise, and stretching almost to the horizon on the clouds far below.
I have since explored the mountain with much less effort in a Sri Lanka Air Force helicopter, getting close enough to the temple to observe the resigned expressions on the faces of the monks, now accustomed to such noisy intrusions.
The rock fortress of Yakkagala is actually Sigiriya (or Sigiri, “Lion Rock”), the reality of which is so astonishing that I have had no need to change it in any way. The only liberties I have taken are chronological, for the palace on the summit was (according to the Sinhalese Chronicle the Culavarnsa) built during the reign of the parricide King Kasyapa I (AD 478-495). However, it seems incredible that so vast an undertaking could have been carried out in a mere eighteen years by a usurper expecting to be challenged at any moment, and the real history of Sigiriya may well go back for many centuries before these dates.
The character, motivation and actual fate of Kasyapa have been the subject of much controversy, recently fuelled by the posthumous The Story of Sigiri (Lake House, Colombo, 1972), by the Sinhalese scholar Professor Senerat Paranavitana. I am also indebted to his monumental two-volume study of the inscriptions on the Mirror Wall, Sigiri Graffiti (Oxford University Press, 1956). Some of the verses I have quoted are genuine; other I have only slightly invented.
The frescoes which are Sigiriya's greatest glory have been handsomely reproduced in Ceylon: Paintings from Temple, Shrine and Rock (New York Graphic Society/UNESCO, 1957). Plate V shows the most interesting – and the one, alas, destroyed in the 1960's by unknown vandals. The attendant is clearly listening to the mysterious hinged box she is holding in her right hand; it remains unidentified, the local archaeologists refusing to take seriously my suggestion that it is an early Sinhalese transistor radio.
The legend of Sigiriya has recently been brought to the screen by Dimitri de Grunwald in his production The God King, with Leigh Lawson as a very impressive Kasyapa.
The Space Elevator
This apparently outrageous concept was first presented to the West in a letter in the issue of Science for 11 February 1966, “Satellite Elongation into a True 'Sky-Hook' ", by John D. Isaacs, Hugh Bradner and George B. Backus of Scripps Institute of Oceanography, and Allyn C. Vine of Wood's Hole Oceanographic Institute. Though it may seem odd that oceanographers should get involved with such an idea, this is not surprising when one realises that they are about the only people (since the great days of barrage balloons) who concern themselves with very long cables hanging under their own weight. (Dr. Allyn Vine's name, incidentally is now immortalised in that of the famous research submersible “Alvin”.) It was later discovered that the concept had already been developed six years earlier – and on a much more ambitious scale – by a Leningrad engineer, Y. N. Artsutanov (Komsomolskaya Pravda, 31 July 1960). Artsutanov considered a “heavenly funicular”, to use his engaging name for the device, lifting no less than 12,000 tons a day to synchronous orbit. It seems surprising that this daring idea received so little publicity; the only mention I have ever seen of it is in the handsome volume of paintings by Alexei Leonov and Sokolov, The Stars are Awaiting Us (Moscow 1967). One colour plate (page 25) shows the “Space Elevator” in action; the caption reads: ". . . the satellite will, so to say, stay fixed in a certain point in the sky. If a cable is lowered from the satellite to the earth you will have a ready cable-road. An 'Earth-Sputnik-Earth' elevator for freight and passengers can then be built, and it will operate without any rocket propulsion.”