Mountain

                     

                  Sri Pada's glorious shadow and its parallels

            The annual pilgrims' progress to Sri Pada, the holiest of the holy hills has already begun.

            Apart from the sanctity of this revered peak, its fascination lies in the exquisite shadow it casts at sunrise.

            Many are the enthralling and awe-inspiring accounts that have been written by past foreign travellers and British administrators, engineers etc, of this phenomenon.

Among them is one by Major Skinner who spent 50 long years here as a skilled and proficient road engineer. Major Skinner pitched his frail talipot camp tent atop the sacred peak to take engineering surveys. His leafy camp comprised a camp bed, a folding chair and a table. This maiden engineering survey atop the holy peak of Sri Pada laid the 'foundation stone' for the making of the first map of Ceylon, as Sri Lanka was then called.