Welcoming the Sun from a sacred mountain top
The annual pilgrims’ progress to Sri Pada, the holiest of holy hills has already started. The devotees include Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims and Christians.
Apart from the sanctity of this revered peak, its splendid fascination lies in the shadow cast at sunrise.
A view from the peak
Many are the enthralling and awe-inspiring accounts that have been written both in verse and prose about this phenomenon-of its glorious shadow thrown at the first rays of the rising sun. Vivid descriptions have been written by foreign travellers of yore and former British administrators who later turned prolific writers giving beautiful accounts of the Peak in their books.
Among such famed British writers, we came across Major Skinner, a skilled roads engineer who spent 50 long years in this beautiful country of ours. Major Skinner pitched his talipot tent atop this holy peak of Sri Pada to take engineering surveys with the help of the theodolite. His fragile camp consisted of a camp bed and folding chair. The first engineering survey pioneered by him atop the sacred peak of Sri Pada, laid the foundation for making the first map of Sri Lanka.
In his book, “Fifty Years in Ceylon”, he gives the following account of this magical shadow at sun rise that he had observed while he was engaged in his engineering surveys on the “summit of Sri Pada in the year of 1833” :-
“I use to often see the most wonderful effects when thus camping out. One such occasion, my sojourn on Adam’s Peak lasted for a fortnight on the top of the cone, where I waited for a clear weather, which I did not get to admit of my completing my observations. One morning as the sun was rising, the shadow of the mountain was thrown across the whole land and sea and the horizon and for a few minutes the apex was doubled and so clearly marked that the little shed over the impression of the Buddha’s feet was perfectly distinct in the shadow. Another most curious effect was that the mist had lain deep in the valley below, between the great peak’s range of Rakwannie. It was an exact representation of the sea: the clouds rolling against the base of the mountain resembling the surf beating against the cliffs which seemed to project in to the sea, the points of the hills peeping through the mist appeared like beautiful islands”.
The next occurs over the roof of the world, the Tibetan mountain range where the shadow is cast over the summit of the mountain range called Omeish Peak. It is also called the ‘Buddha’s glory’. Here too its exquisite shadow is cast soon after sunrise.