File:In old Ceylon (1908) (14783212895).jpg

Anuradhapura, North Central Province, Sri Lanka; Anuradhapura, Ceylon (Place Depicted)
Identifier: inoldceylon00farr (find matches)
Title: In old Ceylon
Year: 1908 (1900s)
Authors: Farrer, Reginald John, 1880-1920
Subjects: Sri Lanka -- Description and travel
Publisher: London : E. Arnold
Contributing Library: University of California Libraries
Digitizing Sponsor: MSN

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perfect regularity. And this is all thatremains of the great Brazen Palace, that miracle of archi-tectural wealth and splendour. Beyond it, down a branchof the road, is something yet more august, for there is tobe seen a forest of aged, filmy trees, enclosed in a walledparallelogram ; and that enclosure, with its high triangularentrance of red brick, is the precinct of the Holy Treeitself. And so we move on to our destination, past allthese wonders, so quiet and tragic now in the grey gloam-ing, past a square swimming-bath of wrought stone, mostelaborate and beautiful, sunk in the grass, to the garden,the bungalow of our host, and our long journeys end.Sated with seeing, I alight, amid the sheets of rain, tomake my welcome, and then—to see yet something else,the very crown and apex and culmination of my seeing.For there, far away across the park beyond, in a perspectiveof the long veranda, appears in the weeping dusk a ghostlygrey shape, exquisite and graceful. And it is the holiest
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Abhayagiriya Dagaba. THE SACRED CITY 223 of all holy things—the Thuparama Dagaba itself, very pivot and centre of devotion in Lanka. And now the eveningbells are ringing to praise from the eastern altar of vast Ruanweli, just beyond the compound, and the drumsare beating through the quiet twilight from the precinctof the Tree :—indeed, at last I am in the Sacred of allSacred Cities. PART III THE SACRED CITYCHAPTER XIII THUPARAMA DAGABA The beginnings of this vast metropolis of monks datefar back into the fourth century b.c, when in NorthernIndia the adventurer Chandragupta destroyed the Greekkingdom of Magadha and established his own sovereignty.After his sons reign of twenty-eight years succeeded hisgrandson (^andasoka. Asoka was one among the hundredand one sons of Bindusara by his sixteen Queens. Byhis piety and supernatural wisdom, says the Mahavansa, he became all-powerful Emperor in India. As he killed ia cool hundred of his brothers, it is not unkind to suggestthat other q

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