Samantakuta

The wind here is endless.

It whistles. Pokes its icy snout into my crevices.  

Whispers past the iron railings stuck into my side. I shouldn’t care. But personally, I like the sun. It is my great misfortune to have spent my whole life (well, at least the past 12,000 years. Bit of a blur before that) on a cold and foggy mountain-top.

Below my bulbous, bushy, bulk the mountain falls away in a vertiginous swoop. After about a hundred meters straight down the hillside slopes outward into a gentler incline.  A line of steps snakes down ridges like a long white jagged scar. Through thick green forest. Brightly dressed devotees like ants, swarming up wards.  They start climbing in the middle of the night. So you hardly ever see the mountain without them. Overall, if you were a bird flying above me, being whipped about gusts, you’d see something like a giant god-sized mossy ant-hill.

I’d introduce myself.

But it’s complicated. I’m so many things.

And yet, mostly I’m not any of those things.

Not in the way people think, anyway.

You’d think I’d remember exactly when I attained boulder-hood, but one of the problems of being thousands years old is that you tend to forget things. You’d also think I have interesting thoughts, having seen so many monsoons pass me by. You’d be wrong. It turns out I don’t have any of those long thoughts people talk of. Just slow ones. About damp. Or noise.

Damn bells everywhere…

There is a shack about fifteen feet below me. That’s where the pilgrims stop to catch a breath, listen to the pounding of their hearts in their head. Order a cup of strong tea with lots of milk and sugar. The “walls” of the shack are polythene sheets, translucent in their thinness, whipping about in the pre-dawn wind. The corrugated roofing is weighed down by a few bags of rubble, and old, bent, iron piping.  

There’s always a dog or two or seven in the tea shack. Pint-sized mongrel types of murky, distinctly diverse ancestry. Coats a dozen shades of dirty brown with hints of faded white. Curled up near the feet of a pilgrim. Ernest, foxy snouts. Absorbing the warmth of company through a furtive, snuffling, proximity. Inching closer if you move away. They don’t have names. Well, not human ones. Though one of the tea-shack boys calls the smallest one Citizen. A big name for such a small puppy.

The mongrels are the only animals that come here now. In the old days lone elephants would wonder up the mountain.  Placing their tree-trunk legs slowly and carefully on the steep inclines. Grasp a bunch of leaves on a branch with the delicate, prehensile tip of a trunk. Haul it down. Unhurried. Until it rips off the tree.  Curve the trunk mouth-wards. Chew, thoughtfully. Gravely. They haven’t been here for a hundred and fifty years. They were all shot when the coffee plantations were planted. Then the coffee died….

But I digress. What I mean to say, was…

I like the tea-shack. Practical.

Warm.

Not holy at all.

Which brings us to the crux. Or the nub. The essence.

The problem, as it were, is that I’m Holy.

Well, not exactly me, but the oversized, slightly cartoonish footprint on me. Its on my… well, you wouldn’t understand boulder anatomy, would you, so lets just say on me. You can hardly see it now. It’s covered by so much jeweled bric-a-brac & brass tat. But, as an Englishman (I remember him. He had a face like a morose Great Dane) wrote 200 years ago, “its resemblance to the impression of a human foot is very rude indeed. It is an oblong, five foot four inches long, and two feet seven inches wide in the widest part, which is over the toes”.

 And also the mountain.

That’s Holy too.

And its all… how can I put it…

Different types of holy to different people.  Sort of an all-purpose spiritual buffet.

People have been setting up myriad worshipful whatnots on the mountain and me for thousands of years. In recent times, I’ve been wearing a temple as shiny as it is tacky. Used to be wood, this tutelary top-hat. A few centuries years ago. With carvings. But now it’s all concrete & brass railings. Multi-coloured flappy flag bits. Makes my surface itch, all this kitsch. I guess it could be worse. It used to be silver umbrellas at one point in the 1600s.

Every few hundred years one king or chieftain or local Big Man loses and another wins and the flags and umbrellas and knickknacks on the mountaintop change. The ancient (well, middle-aged, I’d say) chronicles change tack promptly, like a clipper when the wind turns, say things about the old boss like  "…. he adopted a false faith. He placed miscreant ascetics of false faith on the Sumanakuta to take for themselves all the profit accruing therefrom" etc. Then about the new boss “[h]e commanded the adherents of the false faith from now onwards not to do so, and charged the sons of the [insert new deity] to carry out in the right way the many sacrificial ceremonies which should be performed there”. Etc etc.

Hereabouts, the chronicles tend to agree with whoever is running the show at the moment.

Have done so for thousands of years.

Still do.

Shiva’s Peak.

Adams Peak.

Pico De Adam.

St. Thomas’s Peak,

Siri Pada, Ascent to heaven…

So many names for one mountain. There’s barely any deity around who doesn’t seem to have some sort of lien or right of way here.  Some call my mountain…  

(Yes yes I don’t own it but it as much mine as yours. More mine I think, if you consider who came here first. Technically I’m part of the mountain. Until I roll off, that is. Or am quarried to build condominiums.)

…any way, some call the mountain Saman Kande, the mountain of Saman. Who, you may ask, is Saman? Aha. Saman the deity of the wilderness. Saman the lord of the mountain fastness. You can find his statues in dewale shrines, where Hindu gods are worshiped, often inside a Buddhist temple. But some people think he was a local chieftain thousands of years ago. I remember his name on the lips of pilgrims for more than two millennia.  He’s not alone, though. A thousand five hundred year ago, a Chinese monk wrote “when Buddha came to this country, wishing to transform the wicked nagas, by his supernatural power he planted one foot at the north of the royal city, and the other on the top of a mountain”. Yes. My mountain. Almost a thousand years later, an itinerant Moroccan explorer “My only desire in coming to this island was, to visit the blessed foot of our forefather Adam”. Apparently Adam stood on me on one foot for ages as an act of atonement. Though alternatively, it could’ve been for a lark. Or because he’d made some sort of bet. You can never tell.  

A Venetian merchant who visited me on the advice of Kublai Khan wrote “they say that on this mountain is the sepulchre of Adam our first parent; at least that is what the Saracens say. But the Idolaters say that it is the sepulchre of SAGAMONI BORCAN, before whose time there were no idols. Five centuries ago a Chinese voyager claimed that the footprint on me was made by P’an-ku, the primordial man. A hundred years afterwards the Portuguese believed that it was that of St. Thomas or of an Ethiopian eunuch, the treasurer of Candace, Queen of the Ethiopians. Two centuries ago: “In the middle of the mountain called Sivanolipatham, three rivers rise out of Sivan’s foot…”.  Apparently Lord Shiva danced on me, and left his footprint.

My personal favorite is the version of Moses of Chorene, the Patriarch of Armenia. That the footprint was made by the devil. Ibidem Satanae lapsum narrant – Satan fell there. I don’t remember seeing him, though. Or is it her?

Anyway, you get the picture. The air here is thick with prayer. Layer upon layer of incense-smoke, wafting fragrance of warm oil, supplications, entreaties, curses, petitions to a dozen different omnipotent omniscient almighties. Like sediment packed densely over millennia. Packed so tight sometimes it feels hard to draw a breath. So thick it’s hard to see very clearly.

Speaking of which, it’s still too early for the mist to clear, this morning. Hints of sun on the horizon, though. Clouds gathering in the folds of the mountain.  I can feel the weight of the pilgrims on me, their clothing wrapped around them. Shivering. Queuing to worship the foot, ring the bell. The quick-soft patter of mongrel-paws. Officious in a way that only small, owner-less dogs can be. The heft of a herd of tourists, weighed down by cameras, lenses, selfie-sticks, backpacks. The soles of their sports-shoes scuffing my skin.

Its not that I mind the company. People have climbed me for so long I cannot imagine life without them.  Like earnest ants, trudging and winding up the slopes. Even before there were footpaths. Before there were steps. Before Alexander the great (actually a man of quite average height, if memory serves…) had chains set into the slopes. Travellers. Pilgrims. Poor people. Rich people. Thin people. Fat people (well, not many fat people, actually. Not in the old days, anyway. Quite steep, these slopes.). I just don’t understand the way they think. Many, full of faith in the giant footprint of their lord and god. Yet full of doubt about the beliefs of the idolaters. The infidels. The worshippers of the false gods.  And the occasional apostate.

Who climbed the same steps.  

Who made the same

obeisance before

the same cleft

in my side.

Odd, that.