But he was confident that Sri Lanka would eventually find peace because it had shown "tremendous resilience over the centuries and practices a rare type of tolerance".

On why he chose to settle in Sri Lanka rather than in his native Britain or one of the more beautiful and peaceful Pacific islands, Clarke said that Sri Lanka was warm, beautiful and intellectually stimulating.

Fifty years of the British winter was more than he could bear, he said. And as for the tropical islands, the ones in the middle of the Pacific were idyllic, but had little culture and no sense of the past, nothing to engage the intellect. But Sri Lanka was alive and stimulating.

"Its 25 hundred years of written history and the abundant ruins and archaeological artefacts, are testimony to the great technological and philosophical civilization that once thrived on the island," he noted.

"Perhaps it is the density of all these factors that makes Sri Lanka unique. In almost half a century of travel, I have not come across another land which concentrates so much of intensity and diversity into so little a land mass," he said.