Nearly three decades of ethnic, religious and political conflict in Sri Lanka have battered a sublime beauty praised by Marco Polo, Mark Twain and DH Lawrence

THE PILGRIMS BEGIN climbing at midnight. In Dalhousie, a village in Sri Lanka’s central hill country, nothing disturbs the night save stray dogs loping furtively in the shadows. Above the town’s main road, Buddhist prayer flags flap in a chilly breeze that sweeps off the mountains.

Nearby, the Kelani Ganga gurgles in its jungle gorge. The Kelani is one of four great rivers that begin among these peaks and nourish the fertile plains below. From here, the river gathers itself as it corkscrews down toward the lowlands, eventually supplying the seaside capital of Colombo with 80 percent of its fresh water.

The pilgrims bathe their feet in the wild brook. They pass a shrine to the Hindu elephant deity Ganesh, and, nearby, a supine Buddha is illuminated by flickering candles. They walk beneath an imposing stone gate – past a white dagobaand all-night snack shops selling jaggery and incense and greasy naan – to a set of 3,000 rough-hewn stone stairs that wind up the mountain. Ahead and far above is Sri Pada, Sri Lanka’s holiest mountain.

Rising 2,243 vertiginous meters out of the misty jungle, Sri Pada’s rocky summit dwarves the surrounding low-slung hills. Seen from afar, the mountain resembles nothing so much as the Paramount Pictures logo. On a clear day, it is visible from the island’s coast. Indeed, in antiquity mariners were said to navigate the shore by referencing the peak.

And the mountain – known in English as Adam’s Peak – looms equally large in Sri Lanka’s mythology. Visiting in the 13th century as an emissary from the court of Kublai Khan, Marco Polo recorded stories of a “very high mountain, so rocky and precipitous that the ascent is impractical, as it is said, excepting by the assistance of iron chains employed for the purpose.”

The ancient traveler Ibn Battuta reported that the last and highest of these was known as the “chain of witness” because pilgrims dangled over the precipice were apt to look down and perceive their doom. More than one chronicler recorded instances of unlucky pilgrims dashed to death against the jagged rocks. Yet for centuries Sri Pada has kept an enigmatic allure as the sacred heart of this deeply religious island. John Still, a Victorian traveler who spent a great deal of time exploring the mountain and its environs, called it “one of the vastest and most reverenced cathedral of the human race.”

Significantly in a nation sharply divided along religious lines, Sri Pada is also a place reverenced by all the island’s major faiths. Sinhalese Buddhists, who make up around three-quarters of Sri Lanka’s population, believe that the Buddha alit here during the last of his three proselytizing journeys to the island, leaving a footprint on the mountain’s summit. Thus the mountain’s Sinhalese name – “the resplendent foot.” To Hindu Tamils, the mountain is Svargarohanam – “the ascent to heaven” – and the footprint is that of Lord Shiva, who, according to legend, danced on the top. To the Muslims who arrived as traders beginning in the 13th century, it is the place where Adam, having been cast out of the Eden, took his first step into a sinful world.

For as long as travelers have come to this island in the Indian Ocean, they have likened Sri Lanka to paradise, a garden of earthly delights overwhelming in its tropical abundance. Mark Twain, who visited during an 1897 tour of the equator, was spellbound by its richness. “Dear me, it is beautiful!” he wrote. “There was that swoon in the air which one associates with the tropics, and that smother of heat, heavy with odors of unknown flowers.”

By rights, Sri Lanka should be paradise. It is a small island of only 21 million people, easily traversed by car or by the clanking antique railway that serves the former British hill stations in the center of the country. Its religious shrines and archaeological sites, including the old royal capitals at Polonnaruwa and Anuradhapura, rank among South Asia’s most intriguing. Along the island’s southern coast, devastated by the 2004 tsunami, luxury resorts once again nestle against a warm cerulean sea. And the island’s landscape is unmatched in its fecundity. Everywhere, things are growing. Spice trees fill the botanical gardens. Forests hang heavy with mangoes and orchids that glitter like jewels under the heavy canopy. Jungle vines twist and creep over the ruins of ancient temples. Elephants and leopards roam the hills. Barbets and parakeets clamor in the trees.

In One Thousand and One Nights, Sinbad the Sailor visits Sri Lanka on one of his many voyages. He returns home with tales of a land so naturally rich that jewels flow in the rivers. The hills of the country are still rich with gems: rubies and amethysts and sapphires as blue as the sea that are dislodged from bedrock and washed down with the seasonal rains. In the island’s southern mountains, it is not uncommon to see men wading in the frigid streams fishing for treasures to sell in the busy street market of Ratnapura, the “city of gems.”

But intertwined with Sri Lanka’s stirring natural voluptuousness is a history of endless violence and material poverty. For centuries, the island’s spices and gems drew conquerors — first the Portuguese and the Dutch, and then the British, who in 1815 absorbed the island into their empire. And those graceful Buddhist dagobas and holy sites that draw thousands of pilgrims are also contested ground in a complicated, decades-long communal conflict over rightful ownership of paradise. In Sri Lanka, Eden comes stocked with snakes.

On my first morning in the country, I wake to the chattering of monkeys. A dozen of them, macaques with matted gray fur, have taken over the hotel balcony. They bare inch-long fangs and hiss over a plate of rotting mangoes and bananas left out overnight. After gorging themselves, they scatter into the jungle.

The town of Kandy spills down the hill below, a jumble of corrugated tin roofs. Beyond them is a small lake with a greasy scum on its surface. Obscenely fat jackfruit hang on the tree trunks. The night’s rain hasn’t done anything for the humidity. Already the air feels clotted, swollen.

Next to the lake is a sprawling whitewashed pile: Kandy’s famous Temple of the Tooth. Built in the late 15th century as a place for the island’s kings, the complex was partially burned by Portuguese invaders and rebuilt in the 18th century. Deep inside its two-story shrine, guarded by arching elephant tusks and ensconced like a Russian nestling doll in a bejeweled casket, is Sri Lanka’s most celebrated Buddhist relic, an incisor taken – so the story goes – from the Buddha’s funeral pyre and smuggled to the island in the hair of an Indian princess.

In times past, the tooth was removed from its shrine once a year and paraded through the city streets atop an elephant dripping with sapphires and rubies. In 1922, D H Lawrence happened to witness the procession while spending a month in Sri Lanka en route to Australia. He recorded his impressions in a poem: “A naked, gleaming laugh, like a secret out in the dark/and flare of a tropical energy, tireless, afire in the dark, slim limbs and breasts/Perpetual, fire-laughing motion, among the slow shuffle of elephants.”

Today, the sacred tooth is kept behind a tight security cordon. Barefoot, white-robed pilgrims who come to prostrate themselves before the relic must first pass through metal detectors and a body search. There is good reason for concern: in January 1998, Tamil separatists crashed a truck into the temple’s façade and blew it up, killing 8 worshippers and wounding dozens more.

Subtle reminders of Sri Lanka’s precarious security situation are everywhere. In Colombo, the otherwise charmingly shambolic capital, heavily armed soldiers peer suspiciously from behind sandbagged checkpoints at seemingly every intersection. In Galle, fighter jets streak above the graceful walls of a Dutch-era fort. Near a heavily fortified army base in a majority-Tamil area, buses are stopped and checked for bombs, their passengers forced to wait in the drizzle. The scene reminds me of walking around Belfast in the early 1990s, when invisible sectarian borders demarcated every street.

Occasionally, the war is all too visible. Sri Lanka is, after all, just emerging from 26 years of civil conflict that has killed an estimated 70,000 people, most of them civilians. And while travel is perfectly safe outside the war zone at the island’s northern tip, which remains closed to both tourists and journalists, brazen, bloody terrorist attacks do still dominate international headlines. In July 2001, for instance, Tamil rebels managed to infiltrate Sri Lanka’s international airport and destroy a large part of the country’s air force and civilian fleet. More recently, in March, a suicide bomber attacked a Muslim religious procession in the country’s south, killing 14 people, including a government minister.

The spasmodic violence has frightened away visitors – a double disaster for an economy that relies heavily on tourism for revenue. According to government statistics, tourism has plummeted by more than 10 percent in the past two years. In January, when the civil war seemed to be lurching toward a bloody denouement in the country’s north, 32 percent fewer visitors arrived than during the previous year.

Ancient Arab travelers who visited Sri Lanka called the island Serendib, from which derives the modern word serendipity, and a journey around the island can be filled with fortuitous accidents. I am driving north from Kandy, for instance, when a traffic jam materializes. When I get out of the car, I see that a herd of wild elephants had wandered next to the busy road. They graze in the tall grass, oblivious to the diesel lorries screaming past on the shoulder.
But not all chance encounters are happy. A few days later, I run into another traffic snarl. This time, a suicide bomber has detonated himself at an army checkpoint on the road ahead. Eight people are dead, among them civilians shopping at a nearby market on a Sunday morning.

The rock fortress of Sigiriya, three hours north of Kandy, is carved from a knuckle of hardened magma rising 200m above the surrounding swampy plain. Its sheer sides would seem to make it unscalable. But in fact a steep path snakes up the rock face, past magnificently preserved frescoes of frolicking goddesses and a wall scrawled with ancient graffiti, to the remains of a palace built on top of the rock.

Sigiriya’s most intriguing feature, though, is at its entrance: a giant set of lion’s claws flanking a stairway, the only remaining portion of a much larger statue. A ruler descending from the impregnable fortress to meet his subjects would have emerged from the lion’s open jaws.

It is a pregnant political symbol. The Sinhalese, after all, have long styled themselves the “people of the lion.” (Singh is sanskrit for lion.) And even if the king of the jungle no longer roams the country’s forest, he still adorns everything from the Sri Lankan flag to bottles of Lion Lager to the uniforms of the country’s beloved cricket team.

Indeed, according to the Mahavamsa, an ancient Buddhist chronicle containing Sri Lanka’s creation myth, the Sinhalese are literally descended from lions. The story goes like this: in northern India, a king falls in love with a lion, which bears him two sons. One of the princes, named Vijaya, is banished from his father’s kingdom. Along with 700 of his loyal followers, Vijaya journeys to Sri Lanka and claims the island as his kingdom, wiping out its native inhabitants and planting the lion’s flag. From his deathbed back in India, the Buddha directs Vijaya to establish Sri Lanka as a Buddhist kingdom and spread the religion. As indeed he did. Therevada Buddhism, the religion’s most conservative strain, spread from Sri Lanka to Thailand and the rest of Southeast Asia.

Before the 19th century, the story of the Mahavamsa was virtually unknown. The chronicle was written in an obscure language, its existence known only to a few Buddhist priests. Then, in 1826, an enterprising officer in the British colonial service produced the first English translation of the saga. Soon chauvinist Sinhalese politicians were citing the story of Vijaya as evidence that they were the true heirs of the lion king, and thus the rightful lords of the island.

It mattered not that the Mahavamsa was a fairly tale. As Michael Ondaatje observed in his memoir of growing up in Sri Lanka in the 1940s, a well-told lie is worth a thousand facts.

In 1939, the half-forgotten chronicle, revived as a tool of political division, precipitated the first blows of what would become Sri Lanka’s civil war. In that year, an ambitious Tamil politician named G G Ponnambalam gave a fiery speech denouncing the Mahavamsaand the historical myth of Sinhalese dominance. Rioting broke out, and quickly spread before being put down by the British. Forty-four years later, violence in the same area would push the country’s ethnic conflict past the point of no return.

Compared to the convulsive end of their empire in India, the British slipped out of Sri Lanka almost gracefully. In the hill towns of Sri Lanka’s tea country, in fact, it’s possible to imagine they never left.

Neat bungalows with trimmed rose bushes line the country lanes – a twee pastoral tableau that wouldn’t look out of place in Yorkshire. In Nuwara Eliya, the center of the hill country, founded by a legendarily prolific British elephant hunter, social life revolves around an 18-hole golf course and the Sunday races at the Nuwara Eilya Race Course. At the famous Hill Club, white-gloved waiters still serve British fare. The Tea Factory, a luxury hotel on the edge of town lovingly converted from its original function, goes one better: its grounds include a manicured hedge maze.

Nuwara Eliya once produced the fuel for Britain’s empire. Sri Lanka remains among the world’s largest black tea exporters, producing around 300 million kilos of the fragrant leaves annually. In the surrounding scalloped hills, Tamil women, identifiable by their colorful headscarves, still pick the crop laboriously by hand.

They, too, are a legacy of the British. Desperate for labor for their vast tea plantations, the colonialists imported thousands of Tamil workers from south India. Indeed, Tamils enjoyed a place of privilege in the colonial administration, occupying many civil service jobs. Even before independence, resentment simmered among the majority Sinhalese.

Sri Lanka gained independence in 1948, a year after India. But unlike India, Sri Lanka passed into nationhood with a sleepy sedateness matching its reputation for tropical languor. Seated beneath the gilded throne of the last king of Kandy, deposed 133 years prior, a representative of King George IV handed the nation over to its first Prime Minister, D S Senanayake. A year after independence, the country was still being lauded as an “oasis of stability, peace and order” compared to its giant neighbor.

Yet the center did not hold. Whereas in India the struggle against British rule created a nascent national identity uniting its many factions, Sri Lanka’s peaceful separation from the empire only deepened its preexisting social fractures. The country’s post-independence Sinhalese leaders staked their flags on the narrowest sectarian ground. The tipping point came in 1956, with the nation’s fourth prime minister, Solomon West Ridgeway Dias Bandaranaike, a suave, Oxford-educated son of a powerful Anglican family who converted to Buddhism late in life. Although Bandaranaike reportedly spoke Sinhalese only haltingly, he championed a law making it the country’s official language. The effect was to exclude Tamils from government jobs and coveted spots in the nation’s universities. In the 1970s alone, the number of Tamils admitted to university engineering and medical programs dropped by half.

Largely by appealing to nativist sentiments, Banaranaike was elected prime minister in a landslide. A new generation of Sinhalese politicians took a lesson from the result: the path to power lay in controlling the majority. Instead of cultivating a national identity, politicians cynically used the country’s rich historical traditions, including the Mahavamsa, to enshrine Sinhalese privilege in the minds of millions.

Suddenly disenfranchised – and just as importantly, written out of the country’s creation myth – some Tamil politicians began agitating for an autonomous homeland on the island’s northern tip. As their resentment grew, so did their radicalism. In 1983, Tamil separatist insurgents staged a deadly ambush on an army patrol near Jaffna, in the north. In response, the country exploded into a conflagration still known as Black July. Sinhalese mobs rioted in Colombo, killing hundreds of Tamils with machetes or fists. 80,000 people were forced from their homes.

The cataclysmic violence of Black July radicalized Sri Lankans across the political spectrum. “Its flames seared the collective consciousness of the Tamil community,” says Dayan Jayatilleka, a Sinhalese political scientist and former journalist who now serves as the country’s ambassador to the UN. Visiting the house of an acquaintance during the violence, Jayatilleka says he saw the charred bodies of the man’s family in the doorway. “I talked my way out of the mob of juvenile youth, menacingly rolling tires, which were used to ‘necklace’ their victims.”

Jayatilleka, then 25, dropped out of doctoral studies in the US and went underground as a revolutionary fighter. Before negotiating an amnesty and entering politics, he was wanted as a terrorist.

He says that the lasting effect of the 1983 massacre was to empower extremists on both sides. “The moderates, progressives and leftists on both sides of the ethnic divide were targeted and murdered by the extremists of each community,” he says.

In the jungles of the north, the most militant Tamils gravitated to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, a terrorist group whose extreme ethnic nationalism broached no political compromise. Their symbolism was darkly apt: if the Sinhalese were the people of the lion, then the separatists were tigers, equally fierce and equally ready to murder for their cause. Under their mysterious leader, Velupillai Prabhakaran, the self-styled “Sun God” of the Tamils, the Tigers methodically purged less extreme groups and began a seemingly endless campaign of suicide bombings and assassinations against military and civilian targets. Their brutality was unmatched. As is often noted, the LTTE pioneered the use of boats to deliver bombs – copied by al-Qaeda in the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole – and the use of suicide bombers, a tactic adopted by terrorists around the world. In the group’s most infamous hit, a female bomber killed former Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991.

In 2005, hard-line president Mahinda Rajapaksa entered office vowing to crush the Tigers once and for all. With an infusion of military technology from China and India, government forces have come tantalizingly close to a final military victory, boxing the separatist holdouts in a tiny square of jungle on the country’s northern tip.

But, weary as average Sri Lankans are of the endless fighting, few believe that peace will come easy after so many years of bloodshed. The Tigers’ leaders, who are rumored to wear cyanide capsules around their necks for use if captured, may well choose to make a suicidal last stand, sacrificing untold numbers of civilian lives rather than giving up their dream of a separate slice of Eden.

the mahavamsatells another story. The ancient chronicle recounts how, shortly after attaining enlightenment, the Buddha traveled to Sri Lanka to preach. He found the island wracked by war. Two kings, an uncle and a nephew, were fighting over a gem-encrusted throne. The people cowered in terror. They offered the Buddha the whole of their island. “Only,” they begged, “release us from our fear.” To mark the return of peace, the story goes, Buddha left his footprint on the holy mountain of Sri Pada.

It is perhaps this dream of elusive reconciliation, of a shared sacred geography, that draws thousands of pilgrims to the mountain from the first full moon in December until May. Buddhist monks in orange robes mix with Tamil women in colorful saris and foreigners in flip-flops. Young Sri Lankans making the pilgrimage chatter and exchange instant messages. Older pilgrims still make the climb barefoot and wear a strip of clean white cloth wrapped around their foreheads – an offering to be placed before the sacred footprint. They begin the grueling four-hour climb in the middle of the night, hoping to reach the summit by first light, when the rising sun casts a clear but fleeting shadow image of the peak on the surrounding clouds.
In times past, pilgrims carried torches up the mountain, and the procession formed what one visitor called a “chain of fire.” Now electric lights illuminate the pilgrims’ way. In the black of night, they trace a path into the starry sky: a promise of paradise regained. It is the promise that Sri Lanka has come so close to fulfilling so many times, only to find it slipping further from reach.

The pilgrims climb through the night. The smell of incense and the sounds of the jungle are all around them. Gentle chanting wafts down the mountain. They climb into the clouds, and finally to the summit, where the mythical footprint is surrounded by a small bejeweled shrine. A bell is rung to mark a successful pilgrimage. Young Sri Lankans huddle together for warmth beneath plastic tarps. They wait as an amber glow creeps into the corners of the sky. Finally they turn to face the gathering dawn.