The Sea Inside

terraces, surrounding the octagonal villa which acted as a kind of compass in this improbable coordinate. To the north was Ceylon, to the east the Bay of Bengal, to the west Arabia and Africa. To the south was the Indian Ocean, and beyond, the South Pole. All the world might be seen from such a place, while its prying eyes were excluded. The setting only encouraged de Mauny in his ambition. He sought to evoke a grand tour, as Christopher Ondaatje wrote, with ‘echoes of the Italian lakes, the isle of Capri, some details of the Kandyan style, Alhambra styled carved wooden pillars and even some elements of the Vatican gardens’.
    At the heart of this exquisite palace lay its Hall of the Lotus, open to the skies and lined with panels of blue and gold. It was entered through a theatrical arch dressed with blue silk curtains in the
art nouveau
style (there were no doors); its dome rested on eight sky-blue pillars. The entire house resembled a magical lantern set down on the tiny island, illuminated by golden light pouring through amber-coloured glass blinds. Even the iron gates that admitted the chosen to this artificial paradise were surmounted with brass-headed peacocks through whose turquoise eyes, it was said, one could see the vast Indian Ocean sprawling through time.
    To fill his house de Mauny designed his own furniture, made in Colombo to a French style, some pieces of which survive even now, despite floods and hurricanes. Work proceeded slowly, and it was not until 1931 that de Mauny took up residency in his lavish abode. Throughout the thirties, European nobility called on Taprobane – the same society that had rejected the would-be aristocrat back home was lured to his island, as if what was taboo in Western circles could be allowed far from its salons and drawing rooms. But de Mauny had only a few years to enjoy his grand entertainments; he died of a heart attack in 1941, and with his death his vision seemed to slip back into the sea. A year later his son, a naval commander who lived in Hampshire, sold the island.

    One afternoon in 1949, in his country home near Salisbury, Wiltshire, where his family had occupied the great mansion at Wilton since Shakespeare performed his plays there, David Herbert, second son of the Earl of Pembroke, was showing his family albums to his friend, the American writer Paul Bowles. Turning the pages, Bowles happened on a photograph of Taprobane, taken when Herbert had visited Ceylon in the 1930s.
    Bowles was transfixed. He saw the ‘tiny dome-shaped island with a strange looking house at its top, and, spread out along its flanks, terraces that lost themselves in the shade of giant trees’. Bowles was an inveterate wanderer in exotic places; he was also the newly successful author of
The Sheltering Sky
, a nightmarish story set in Morocco, where he and his wife Jane were at the centre of a group of bohemian expatriates. But Bowles, who was naturally reclusive, had begun to find their company claustro-phobic, and seeking to escape, determined to go to Ceylon. He sailed from Antwerp that December, on the freighter
General Walter
. As the ship drew nearer to the island, he found himself recalling Kafka: ‘From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reached.’
    Bowles was referring to the book he was trying to write, although he might have been addressing his psycho-logical state. When he finally saw Taprobane, the black-and-white photograph he had glimpsed in an English stately home became reality, and it exceeded his expectations, ‘an embodiment of the innumerable fantasies and daydreams that had flitted through my mind since childhood’. Two years later, Bowles bought the island for five hundred dollars. It became his version of Cuthbert’s Inner Farne, albeit rather more worldly and sensual.
    Bowles relished his retreat. ‘The maid polished the furniture and filled bowls with orchids. The gardener fetched things from the market in the village on the mainland. Another man, a Hindu, came twice a day to empty the latrines, as there was no running water on the island. Life moved like clockwork,’ he claimed, ‘there were no complications.’ In the evening, Bowles and his lover, Mohammed Temsamany, would wade across the water in their bathing suits, their servants carrying their masters’ clothes in bundles on their heads. On the other side, they would dress and set off in the direction of the devil dancers whose