Julian Rathbone - Kings of Albion

After a day or two during which our path meandered with a river we came to its confluence with a larger waterway, one of the two great rivers of that empire, the great Tungabhadra, and the next day the most wonderful sight I had ever seen presented itself to my eyes as we wound with the river round a vast crag and saw beneath us the City of Victory.

It is a city larger, more beautiful, more harmonious in architecture and in the lives of the hundred thousand who live there, than anywhere else in the world. Byzantium and Rome may have monuments to equal those of the City of Victory, but none to surpass them, and by no means so numerous, and both have suffered the ravages of age and numerous conquests while those of Vijayanagara are at the most only a century old: indeed, building even now continues apace in the suburbs and on the summits of the surrounding crags. Cambaluk alone has ornamentation and open spaces as fine – but forbidden, of course, to ordinary mortals.

Religions the world over have tempted us away from the proper purpose of our lives, the pursuit of happiness on earth, by promising an afterlife in a heavenly city unachievable on earth. Let their prophets and priests look on the City of Victory and admit their error.

'My dear Ali, clearly you have not been advised of the new laws.' 'What new laws are those, Mah-Lo?'

'Since the most recent incursions of the Bahmani sultans there has been an interdiction on all aliens and foreigners from leaving the coastal ports. Trade with the interior can now be conducted only through approved intermediaries.'

I did not know that.What a terrible shame for you. You are not bored by an account of our capital city? Well, then, I shall proceed.'

My dear Xlah-Lo, you must have been there yourself. Why am I wasting your time with an account of what you already know well?'

The City of Victory occupies a natural basin through which the river flows and which is surrounded by wild crags in a crescent that protect it from attack from all quarters of the compass, save the east. These crags are linked with massive walls of wedge-shaped masonry and the gates are so placed in this indomitable combination of natural and man-made defences that caravans, or approaching hostile armies, have to make sharp turns beneath angled battlements from which missiles and boiling pitch can be hurled and tipped. These gateways also serve as customs posts where tribute and taxes, which are a major source of the wealth and splendour inside, arc-collected: the City of Victory is not merely a consumer, using its own vast wealth deriving from spices, diamonds and gold to buy in luxuries of all sorts, but is also an entrepot where traders from east and west can meet without having to cross the deserts, mountains and war-lords' domains north of the Himalayas. At least, such was the case when I first made the trip.

It was at the great west-facing gate that the governor of Mangalore and his entourage and guard left us. The rest of us, especially those clearly not citizens of the empire, were subjected to the usual questions, form-filling, payment of entry taxes and the like, which are everywhere the scourge of anyone whose livelihood has depended on trade. I had to state my business, how I had come to bring to Prince Harihara Raya Kurteishi a package addressed to him, that I intended to seek him out in the next day or two and give it to him.

I have to say that at Vijayanagara (for the name serves both the empire and the city) these formalities were conducted with more politeness and genuine condescension than I have experienced anywhere else, the officials courteous and punctilious and, being no less prosperous than any of their fellows in that earthly paradise, quite immune to bribery. Indeed, they showed a humanity I had never previously experienced from such functionaries, to the extent that when I had to let my cloak drop, their attitude to my scarred and mutilated face and body was not of fear or derision as is usually the case, but solicitude and polite curiosity as to how I had been so horribly disfigured. Moreover, they recommended to me a hostel attached to a temple when- I would be well received and not charged at all, apart from what I might feel able to give freely, as charity. Admitted at last through that great gate, I began my descent, following their directions, through the Sacred Zone, to the small temple they hail indicated.

The great river itself divides the city into two main sectors, which are built on the steep hills above it leaving a wide plain between. This is filled with fields, especially of cotton, orchards, plantations, parks and gardens, terraced on the higher levels and all irrigated with abundant water, channelled into canals that feed tanks ami reservoirs. The loftier of these supply large, ornate fountains, set on decorated belvederes, from which the citizens gaze across the valley to the broken mountain ranges, often clad in mist, a hundred miles away.

This Sacred Zone was filled with temples dedicated to the pantheon of what I soon learnt I should not call the Hindu religion, of which the most magnificent were dedicated to Shiva and Vishnu and the goddess Fampa, who is identified with the river. I cannot do justice to this vast complex of temples with their endless ornamentation, decoration and colour. There was also much fantastic statuary, particularly at gateways or at the bottom of the many flights of stairs. These were representations of tigers and elephants, done to the life so you almost felt nervous of walking where a massive foot might tread on you, or a large cat might sink its claws into your back.

Every wall is pierced with galleries and pillared arcades on which a thousand thousand images in carved and painted stucco present the lives, adventures and loves of their gods and goddesses, and their heroic avatars. Shiva rides his bull, or Rama, an avatar of Vishnu, searches for his wife Sita, abducted, according to legend, by Ravana; the tale continues as the monkey general Hanuman leads his hordes against Ravana. And in places where the vast walls were not divided into countless alcoves and shrines they were filled with statues in deep relief, or were richly painted with murals of dancing men and women, princes and princesses, gods and goddesses, often performing with open joy the act of procreation, which seem somehow to express the fecundity of the area and an eagerness to enjoy and share with others the earthly pleasures of this life.

These decorations are all richly coloured in every hue of the rainbow, with scarlets, crimsons and the deep rich blue of lapis-lazuli, speckled with gold, predominating. Indeed I have not mentioned the gold, beaten to airy thinness on every dome, gleaming more solidly on crowns and sword hilts, inlaid in granite, with diamonds from the diamond pipes that are not far off. Everywhere there are flowers, in beds, in hanging baskets, growing in pots, woven into garlands and hung about the images' necks, flowers white, yellow, red and purple that fill the air with a fragrance that mingles with that of the smoke that lazily wreathes the air from a thousand bronze pots that serve as thuribles.

To the south and below this upland area of temples and sacred precincts, and hardly less magnificent, is the Royal Enclave, then east of that, on the far side of the river with its parks and gardens, the township proper. Lacking the natural defences of the higher places it has its own fortifications and includes the multifarious markets, the artisans' shops and factories, the merchant houses and the barracks of the military.

The temple-hostel to which I had been directed was dedicated to Cianesha, the elephant-headed son of the god Shiva and his consort Parvati, or Pampa, who personifies the great river Tungabhadra. I have said that already? Well, I warned you, my mind wanders at times. One of my companions told me that Ganesha is the god to whom one makes supplication at the outset of any great undertaking so it seemed to me therefore an apt place to stay on the first night of my first visit to the City of Victory, a visit that would take me to the end of the world and back. Or, at any rate, as far as Macclesfield.