A few twigs and a piece of mountain

Can a few twigs carefully placed keep a many-ton slab of mountain from falling to earth? So far, yes.

The granite slab hangs precariously just behind the Isurumuniya Vihara, a Buddhist temple at Anuradhapura where, alongside a pool, stone-carved elephants spray water over themselves with great delight. The whole creation – elephants, temple, carvings of a royal lord and horse head – is cut from a massive stone outcrop.

The path to the temple’s summit leads directly beneath the many-ton block of mountain, its gross weight balanced precisely, delicately it feels, between parts of the main outcrop. Reasoned hindsight says that the boulder could hang there for millennia. But at the moment I passed underneath and felt the rock’s immense weight overhead, I hurried along through to the open sky. Why shouldn’t the last moment of the last day of that hypothetical final millennia be right now? 

Only when I turned back did I see the row of twigs, some smaller than match sticks, placed along the crease of the hanging boulder and the shoulder of the outcrop – as if holding up those many tons of granite against the pull of gravity.

They held me up us as well, making me wonder who might have placed those sticks there, and why? No one I asked was able to say and I am still wondering. (A few days later I saw twigs and sticks similarly placed between boulders at the foot of Sigiriya.)

I imagined another passerby, someone who also felt the rock’s imminent crushing power, a power not unleashed this time, at this very moment of his passing beneath. Are those twigs his thanks to some god of delayed death? 

Or are they placed there to ward off the certainty of a future catastrophe, to protect others like myself who will pass under the boulder?

Looking closer I hear laughter in each twig, the ludicrousness of the human wish to defy weight, matter, time.

Perhaps they are the remains of a child’s play. A cave house? Toothpicks for the elephants?

And yet having passed under that slab of suspended mountain and now standing here under the sunlight, alive, I kept returning to the idea that those few small sticks are somehow implicated in the rock’s destiny – and the fate of those who pass beneath. This must have been why I added my own several twigs to the work of others. A gesture of thanks perhaps. A little insurance on behalf of those to come. I don’t know.

What’s more certain is how a few flimsy twigs, and the act of their being placed here, are transforming this stony passageway, in itself a mere heap of broken mountain, into a place of unseen powers – powers, like the rocks themselves, so precisely, delicately balanced between protection and destruction.

Standing here looking back, I think I see the beginnings of something that seems elemental in human experience: how a mere tree or cave or heap of rocks can become extraordinarily potent, a thing of auspicious or ominous energies or both, revered, the home of those who have come and gone before, a place to bring one’s greatest longings, unease and fears.