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Taprobane and Ceylon
For dramatic reasons, I have made three trifling changes to the geography of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). I have moved the island eight hundred kilometres south, so that it straddles the equator – as indeed it did twenty million years ago, and may some day do again. At the moment it lies between six and ten degrees north.
In addition, I have doubled the height of the Sacred Mountain, and moved it closer to “Yakkagala”. For both places exist, very much as I have described them.
Sri Pada, or Adam's Peak, is a striking cone-shaped mountain sacred to the Buddhists, the Muslims, the Hindus and the Christians, and bearing a small temple on its summit. Inside the temple is a stone slab with a depression which, though two metres long, is reputed to be the footprint of the Buddha.
Every year, for many centuries, thousands of pilgrims have made the long climb to the 2,240-metre-high summit. The ascent is no longer dangerous for there are two stairways (which must surely be the longest in the world) to the very top. I have climbed once, at the instigation of the New Yorker's Jeremy Bernstein (see his Experiencing Science), and my legs were paralysed for several days afterwards. But it was worth the effort, for we were lucky enough to see the beautiful and awe-inspiring spectacle of the peak's shadow at dawn – a perfectly symmetrical cone visible only for the few minutes after sunrise, and stretching almost to the horizon on the clouds far below.
I have since explored the mountain with much less effort in a Sri Lanka Air Force helicopter, getting close enough to the temple to observe the resigned expressions on the faces of the monks, now accustomed to such noisy intrusions.
The rock fortress of Yakkagala is actually Sigiriya (or Sigiri, “Lion Rock”), the reality of which is so astonishing that I have had no need to change it in any way. The only liberties I have taken are chronological, for the palace on the summit was (according to the Sinhalese Chronicle the Culavarnsa) built during the reign of the parricide King Kasyapa I (AD 478-495). However, it seems incredible that so vast an undertaking could have been carried out in a mere eighteen years by a usurper expecting to be challenged at any moment, and the real history of Sigiriya may well go back for many centuries before these dates.
The character, motivation and actual fate of Kasyapa have been the subject of much controversy, recently fuelled by the posthumous The Story of Sigiri (Lake House, Colombo, 1972), by the Sinhalese scholar Professor Senerat Paranavitana. I am also indebted to his monumental two-volume study of the inscriptions on the Mirror Wall, Sigiri Graffiti (Oxford University Press, 1956). Some of the verses I have quoted are genuine; other I have only slightly invented.
The frescoes which are Sigiriya's greatest glory have been handsomely reproduced in Ceylon: Paintings from Temple, Shrine and Rock (New York Graphic Society/UNESCO, 1957). Plate V shows the most interesting – and the one, alas, destroyed in the 1960's by unknown vandals. The attendant is clearly listening to the mysterious hinged box she is holding in her right hand; it remains unidentified, the local archaeologists refusing to take seriously my suggestion that it is an early Sinhalese transistor radio.
The legend of Sigiriya has recently been brought to the screen by Dimitri de Grunwald in his production The God King, with Leigh Lawson as a very impressive Kasyapa.
The Space Elevator
This apparently outrageous concept was first presented to the West in a letter in the issue of Science for 11 February 1966, “Satellite Elongation into a True 'Sky-Hook' ", by John D. Isaacs, Hugh Bradner and George B. Backus of Scripps Institute of Oceanography, and Allyn C. Vine of Wood's Hole Oceanographic Institute. Though it may seem odd that oceanographers should get involved with such an idea, this is not surprising when one realises that they are about the only people (since the great days of barrage balloons) who concern themselves with very long cables hanging under their own weight. (Dr. Allyn Vine's name, incidentally is now immortalised in that of the famous research submersible “Alvin”.) It was later discovered that the concept had already been developed six years earlier – and on a much more ambitious scale – by a Leningrad engineer, Y. N. Artsutanov (Komsomolskaya Pravda, 31 July 1960). Artsutanov considered a “heavenly funicular”, to use his engaging name for the device, lifting no less than 12,000 tons a day to synchronous orbit. It seems surprising that this daring idea received so little publicity; the only mention I have ever seen of it is in the handsome volume of paintings by Alexei Leonov and Sokolov, The Stars are Awaiting Us (Moscow 1967). One colour plate (page 25) shows the “Space Elevator” in action; the caption reads: ". . . the satellite will, so to say, stay fixed in a certain point in the sky. If a cable is lowered from the satellite to the earth you will have a ready cable-road. An 'Earth-Sputnik-Earth' elevator for freight and passengers can then be built, and it will operate without any rocket propulsion.”
Although General Leonov gave me a copy of his book at the Vie
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* Also a superb diplomat. After the Vie
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The space elevator is quite clearly an idea whose time has come, as is demonstrated by the fact that within a decade of the 1966 Isaacs letter it was independently re-invented at least three times. A very detailed treatment, containing many new ideas, was published by Jerome Pearson of Wright-Paterson Air Force Base in Acta Astronautica for September-October 1975 ("The Orbital Tower; a spacecraft launcher using the Earth's rotational energy"). Dr. Pearson was astonished to hear of the earlier studies, which his computer survey had failed to locate; he discovered them through reading my own testimony to the House of Representatives Space Committee in July 1975. (See The View From Serendip.)
Six years earlier (Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, Vol. 22, pp. 442-457, 1969) A. R. Collar and J. W. Flower had come to essentially the same conclusions in their paper “A (Relatively) Low Altitude 24-hour Satellite”. They were looking into the possibility of suspending a synchronous communications satellite far below the natural 36,000 kilometre altitude, and did not discuss taking the cable all the way down to the surface of the earth, but this is an obvious extension of their treatment.
And now for a modest cough. Back in 1963, in an essay commissioned by UNESCO and published in Astronautics for February 1964, “The World of the Communications Satellite” (now available in Voices From the Sky), I wrote: “As a much longer term possibility, it might be mentioned that there are a number of theoretical ways of achieving a low-altitude, twenty-four-hour satellite; but they depend upon technical developments unlikely to occur in this century. I leave their contemplation as an exercise for the student.”
The first of these “theoretical ways” was, of course, the suspended satellite discussed by Collar and Flower. My crude back-of-an-envelope calculations, based on the strength of existing materials, made me so sceptical of the whole idea that I did not bother to spell it out in detail. If I had been a little less conservative – or if a larger envelope had been available – I might have been ahead of everyone except Artsutanov himself.