Posted Monday, July 31, 2006; 20:00 HKT

Suddenly, rising above the clumps of tea bushes that smother the rolling hills of central Sri Lanka, a great forested outcropping appears. You pass a long flight of steps along the main road, leading up to a Hindu temple, a sign for a Muslim burial ground, and a Buddhist monk, in lustrous orange robes, standing outside an international-phone-call shack with his umbrella. Then, not long after a billboard alerts you to GUINNESS WORLD RECORD DANCER HEZAM (ENJOY THE SHOW), you go through one final army checkpoint and arrive at the place where all these traditions converge.

A series of more than 3,000 steps leads up and up, past stalls selling sweets, past resting-houses for monks, past a statue of the Buddha reclining, next to the Hindu elephant god Ganesh. Far below, the surge and rush of the Mahaweli River, the island's main artery, keeps you company as you climb. During the pilgrimage season, in winter and spring, fairy lights lead thousands of the faithful up to the blustery summit of Adam's Peak (or Sri Pada, "the Resplendent Foot," as Sri Lankans call it), with its great depression, a little like an oversized footprint, next to which you can see a huge triangular shadow as the sun comes up.

On this midsummer day, however, barely a soul is to be seen on the sacred peak. One lonely cook tends the Japanese peace pagoda, its monk having left for the season. A forestry-commission official is here to talk about "community development," but he seems much keener to talk about the year he once spent in Rhode Island. Wild elephants and leopards take over the mountain as soon as the pilgrims depart. And even on a balmy morning in June, the peak itself, apex of devotion, is blanketed in clouds.

When Marco Polo wrote about "Seilan," as he called it, he devoted half of his few paragraphs to Adam's Peak, which even today local tourist books acclaim as a "symbol of unity." For Buddhists, after all, the 2,243-m mountain is sacred because the "footprint" at the top is said to have been left by the Buddha. Christians sometimes ascribe the print to St. Thomas, Jesus' disciple. Hindus suggest that it belongs to their god Shiva, while Muslims often say that it is the mark of Adam, who wept as he took his leave of Paradise here. Not Eden itself, you note, but the place where you say goodbye to it.

Four major traditions intersect on the small space, therefore, yet each one sees in it something different. The towering symbol of unity is, in other words, a symbol of divergence. And almost everything we think we know about it is wrong, or at least blanketed in clouds. The name Adam's Peak is sometimes ascribed to Sir John Mandeville, the British traveler who, scholars have found, never actually existed. Marco Polo's account is so hazy that it's possible he never came here either. And the one who said, "The mountain is conspicuous from a distance of three days and it contains many rubies and other minerals, and spice trees of all sorts," was, as it happens, Sinbad the Sailor, in The Arabian Nights, who made two trips to the "island of gems."

In summer at least, you come to Adam's Peak not to see the sun rise, but to watch the clouds floating past, and then see the darkness descend.

Continued...