The original of these poems were written during the 8th, 9th, and 10th Centuries on the curving wall half-way up the rock fortress of Sigiriya in the central province of Sri Lanka. The songs, incised in the polished stone, relate to mysterious “golden” women in frescoes painted on the high rock above the “mirror wall”. The women seem to be dancing in the clouds. Many are seen to be subtly smiling, full of inner delight and laughter. Twenty of these portraits have survived since the end of the 5th Century.
Sigiriya, called Lion Rock, rising 600 feet above the green forest, was fortified by a king called Kassapa who reigned from AD 477. An ancient chronicle records how the king built a staircase up to the summit of the rock in the form of a crouching lion and, indeed, to this day visitors can discern the lion shape. “Then he built there a fine palace, worthy to behold, like another Alakamanda and dwelt there like Kuvera”. Kuvera was the god of wealth in the Hindu pantheon, and Alakamanda was the city he occupied on the mythical Mount Kailasa in the Himalayas. The Sanskrit poet Kalidasa, who lived about a hundred years before Kassapa, alludes to the high rock as the “the mirror for goddesses,” adorned with paintings comparable to rainbows in a cloud.
Four of the songs on the mirror wall refer to the women in the frescoes as “asran”, the cloud nymphs of Hindu mythology, who frequent Mount Kailasa. One song suggests they were the king’s 500 wives. Were they “stuck to the rock” as offerings to Kuvera or the local mountain god? Perhaps their function was to ensure sufficient rainfall to grow rice in this dry zone; rain was sometimes regarded as the semen of the gods.
After Kassapa was defeated in battle by his brother, Sigiriya was abandoned as a royal residence, but greatly revered as a place of secular pilgrimage. People were drawn there from all over Sri Lanka and southern India for the next 700 years. Eventually the ruins were smothered in jungle, until the site was opened up in the 19th century and the wonders re-appeared.
Here are a small selection of “poems from the Mirror Wall” out of the remarkable collection of 685 poems that have been preserved in all their glorious beauty, humour, and historical fascination.
1.
The virtue of this breeze,
enriched with jasmine,
giving pleasure to us all,
Comes from the women,
pictured as lianas
bending under the opulent
Burdens of their breasts,
who linger on the edge
of the precipitous rock,
Faithful to their lover
in endless separation,
eyes fixed on the road,
While dancing in reflections
along the mirror wall
waving yellow yak-tail fans.
2.
They came here, looked around, and went,
With this karmic picture
Etched upon their minds.
But they couldn’t stop their hands
wanting to touch
As they climbed and stumbled down.
You salacious people,
Keep your hands off the images
Don’t go giving each breast a rub.
3.
As a woman I’ll gladly
sing for these women
who are unable to speak.
You bulls come to Sigiriya
and toss off little lovesongs
making a big hullabaloo.
Not one has given us
a heart-warming sip
of rum and molasses.
Maybe none of you thought
we woman could have lives
of our own to get through.
There is so much beauty in the world. It is frustrating to think of all we miss, all we will never see, all we will never know. I remember walking with wonder through an exhibition of the work of the 17th Century painter Jan Steen at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam – fortunate to have experienced that. But such a multitude of wonders like this are out of reach. At least, however, I have Heinrich Heine’s comment to savour about that painter – and appropriate to the images on the mirror wall: “Jan Steen understood that our life is just a colourful kiss of God and knew that the Holy Ghost reveals itself most gloriously in light and laughter.”