Here ends the Mahawansa, the rest of the kings belong to the Suluwansa. 19 B.C. A.D. 42 28 " A.D. 113 A.D. 177 12 " A.D. 275 A.D. 308 27 From this point the dates in the first column are from Wijesinha, the second as before from Wickremasinghe, whose figures in all cases are provisional. Aggabodhi I. Aggabodhi III. Mahinda II.. Sena I. Sena II. A.D. 787 Udaya I. Wijaya Bahu I. A.D. 1018 " 36 Wikrama Bahu Gaja Bahu II. Parakrama Bahu I. Wijaya Bahu II.. Nissanka Malla Bhuwaneka Bahu Parakrama Bahu III. Sri Wickrema Raja Singha Wimala Dharama (First King of Kandy) (Last King at Kandy) A.D. 1798 deposed 1815 A.D. 1592 A.D. 28 " 888 THE LOST CITIES OF CEYLON CHAPTER I THE WONDER OF THE PAST AGAINST the smoky orange-red of the after-glow the monkeys looked like little black demons as they leaped from one tree to another. The weird beat of the tom-toms and the droning chant of worshippers round the sacred bo-tree drew me nearer and nearer to the enclosure till I passed under the hideous plaster-coated entrance "erected 1814" by some wealthy devotee. It was almost too dark in the courtyard beyond to distinguish the sturdy round stems, offspring of the parent tree, so dense was the screen of their graceful foliage, but flickering wood fires here and there on the bare sand lit up the solemn dark faces of the pilgrims come from far, and showed strange flashes of Eastern colouring in their clothing. The air was heavy with the fragrance of temple-tree flowers, in scent and shape resembling tuber-roses, lying waxen in saucers ready to be offered. High above, up two terraces, guarded and enclosed, grew the oldest historical tree in the world, with an authentic history of over 2,000 years. Since the ages before Christ the tree has been tended, guarded, and watered, and surrounded with the perfume of adoration and the atmosphere of prayer. It grows at Anuradhapura, the Ancient Royal City of Ceylon. I had little time, when first I saw it nine years ago, to absorb the wonder and mystery, or to search among the carved granite of that city, but ever after I was possessed with the longing to return and penetrate the full measure of its beauty, and at last the chance came. There is nothing that so draws the heart of educated man as the age-old ruins of a civilisation differing from his own; and when those ruins, like jewels, are set in the gold of records minute in detail, as authentic as anything in history can be, and reaching back into ages before the Christian Era, their fascination is increased ten-fold. The Cingalese possess, in that wonderful book the Mahawansa, or as it is sometimes called after its first author, the Mahanama, chronicles surpassing anything other nations can show. From about 500 B.C. up to the time of the English occupation these historical records run. And the fact that they are history and not sacred writings distinguishes them from a multitude of documents of equal antiquity. In the fifth century A.D. a priest of the royal house, called Mahanama, set himself the task of recording in orderly sequence the story of his native land by means of gathering his facts from existing records in the vernacular and collating them. His version carried the tale up to A.D. 301. Hence it was taken on by one pen after another in the same style, each scribe telling in simple fashion and with marvellous human simplicity of the life lived by king and people when Ceylon was a kingdom and the royal cities were centres of civilisation and learning, though as yet our national ancestry had not been evolved, and English," "Scottish," and "Irish," much more "American" or "British" (in its modern connotation), were unknown. The second part of the record is correctly called the Suluwansa, or history of the inferior dynasty (see p. 24), but generally speaking the whole is now referred to under one title. The first part of these records was made available for English readers by George Turnour, who translated the first thirty chapters, the work of Mahanama, in 1837. Turnour was in the Ceylon Civil Service, and in 1827 there came into his hands a transcript of a commentary, which enabled him to translate the Pali text of the original Mahawansa. This commentary was also written by Mahanama. Buddhist writers were in the habit of making some such running commentary, as the Pali scripts had to conform to certain rules of metre which did not lend themselves to clearness of sense, so it was a usual custom to write out a liberal translation in this form, otherwise they were often unintelligible. The task was completed many years later by the publication in 1889 of the translation of the remaining chapters by L. C. Wijesinha, Mudaliyar, which carried the history up to the English occupation. There have since been other versions, but in this work references and quotations are from these two books. The Mahawansa is not the only ancient record of the Cingalese, but it is far the most reliable and continuous, also the most accessible to English readers. Allowing for the legends and supernatural additions which have sprung up around religious events, and discounting the repetitions "with a difference" in the manner of the old nursery fairy-tale, the book, as history, is exceedingly interesting to-day. Among the hundreds of visitors who yearly go to Ceylon, and the thousands who stop a day in port on their way to "somewhere or other" by one of the great liners, it is safe to say that, while all know of Kandy and the hill-resort of Nuwara Eliya, there are comparatively few who have heard anything at all about the far greater attractions of Anuradhapura, Polonnaruwa, and Sigiriya, the three most famous of the royal cities of old Ceylon. Only yesterday a man, whose bent inclined him to interest in old things, said casually in my hearing, "I shan't stop in Ceylon, nothing to see there," and was amazed to learn what there was to see. It is worth while going out East to visit the Ceylon ruins alone, and specially to see the exquisitely carved moonstones; these have nothing to do with the jewels usually associated with the island, but are semi-circular granite stones of a kind peculiarly associated with Ceylon. A few examples of semi-circular stones in a comparatively plain style have been found in South India outside temple entrances, but they have little in common with the richly carved specimens in |