ON INTO CAMBODIA
The French move freely in and out of Indo-China without passports, but
all “foreigners” are tightly bound with red tape. Germans and Russians
are not yet admitted at all, and even harmless tourists are treated as
suspicious characters. In these days of rapid transmission of
information, and its more exciting sister, misinformation, it was
something of a surprise to find, five full years after the signing of
the Treaty of Versailles, that news had not yet reached the colonial
bureaucrats even of this far-flung dependency that the World War was
over. Having been officially robbed of my passport upon landing, as
happens to all _étrangers_, I could recover it only by appearing next
morning at a police office and filling in on both sides a large form
designed to bring out in elaborate detail all the past, present, and
future history of the signer. One question in particular was puzzling:
“Have you ever been in the enemy country?” Since I had been laboring
under the impression that France was just then at peace with all the
world, I asked the official in charge of my case to elucidate. He seemed
to betray a hint of annoyance beneath his perfectly Gallic exterior, and
finally explained that the forms were still those used in war days. “The
high cost of printing, you know....”
One question naturally leads to another: were a few months of helping
his countrymen to hold the bridge-heads on the Rhine to be counted
against me? But he seemed to be growing suspicious of my straight face;
besides, since he was the one functionary in the passport division who
flattered himself on speaking some English, his attention was largely
taken up with seeing that I did not address him in French, or that I at
least should not sully the carefully Anglicized form by answering some
of its questions in that tongue. How could that one of his colleagues
whose laborious monthly duty it is to translate a dozen or more of these
forms for foreigners back into French, as the beginning of a lengthy
_dossier_ on each such individual admitted to the colony, meet any
suspicion that his berth should be abolished, if foreigners were allowed
to do their own translating? The expense of putting those forms into
English, back in war days, would moreover hardly be justified if they
were not used for foreigners as intended; hence nothing more natural
than that even those foreigners whose French is far more fluent than
their English should be compelled to give their history on these
translated forms, even though the official beside me had to help them to
turn their French into English.
I had been too long familiar with French bureaucracy to suppose that my
passport would be returned at once, merely for a bare hour of filling in
a questionnaire. Naturally this had to be taken to men higher up, “for
study,” before so final an action could be taken. But I could prepare to
take the evening steamer to Cambodia “in all tranquillity,” the
philologist of the passport bureau assured me—in his own tongue now, no
doubt because the information was unofficial. My passport would be
handed me on the steamer before she sailed, he confided. His manner was
such that it was hard to keep from flattering myself that my notoriously
honest face had led him to make an admission to me which he would never
have dreamed of making to an ordinary traveler.
He had spoken truly too; the passport was returned, even as he had
foretold, and the manner of its returning showed how valuable are the
services rendered by the swarms of officials who look after such
matters. I had strolled across from my hotel to the steamer _Mekong_
long enough before to be already deep in deck-chair conversation with
the charming young American lady and her merely more elderly chaperon,
whom our tropic-emaciated consul had told me to expect among my
traveling-companions, when a young man in what looked like a disguised
uniform began pacing the deck shouting for “Monsieur Ügh,” as nearly as
his cross between a grunt and a word can be rendered in English. The
fourth or fifth time he disturbed the absorbing pleasure of meeting
one’s own people, of the preferable sex at that, unexpectedly in a far
distant land, I noticed that he waved in one hand an American passport.
About the same moment my returning wits confided to me that the noise he
was making so incessantly was the Frenchman’s most sincere attempt to
pronounce the name “Hughes.” In a whole-hearted desire to help him out
of what was evidently on the verge of becoming a troublesome duty, I
rose and asked the shouter’s permission to look at the document. It was
my own passport. I thanked him cordially for the two forms of relief
this discovery brought, and returned to my conversation.
Before long my attention was distracted once more by another stentorian
voice, this time calling for “Mademoiselle Ügh!” I offered my services
again—and retrieved the passport of the young lady beside me, whose name
was no more Hughes than is my own. Barely had she stowed it away in that
intricate way ladies have of risking their valuable possessions when a
third voice, paging “Madame Ügh!” began to punctuate the summer night. I
recognized the man who had despoiled me of my passport before allowing
me to land from the _Panama Maru_. It was natural that the same official
could not be expected to hand out more than one of the documents that
evening, with so few to go round. Besides, this man had hardly had three
days in which to recover from the task of receiving me into the country.
It caused me no great surprise to find that the paper he now flourished
about his head belonged to the elder of the two ladies beside me, though
her deceased husband had borne a name not even remotely suggestive of
the prolific family Hughes.
Priceless sources of information must the voluminous _dossiers_ of
visitors to Indo-China be, so carefully compiled by the division of
police inspection charged with drawing up and “studying” them. It was
not until I had time later to do some studying of my own that I examined
my passport, with its square yard or less of stamping and annotation by
the French authorities, in an effort to solve the mystery of the name
under which we had evidently all three been registered in the annals of
Indo-China. Only then did I notice that even more prominent, on the face
of the official permissions so generously granted by our Department of
State for American citizens to proceed abroad, than the name of the
holder, was that of one Charles E. Hughes.
Ah, well, what are colonies and “protectorates” and mandated territory
and spheres of influence for if not to provide posts for more officials?
The episode might soon have been forgotten in the glories of a tropical
night, had not so much surprise been shown by the passport officials and
the ship’s company that Monsieur and Madame Hughes had booked separate
cabins. Our passports were again taken away from us in Pnom Penh,
restamped and returned to us there, stamped and registered once more
upon our return to Saïgon, and my own was manhandled I know not how many
more times in sundry places before my travels in Indo-China were over;
but I neglected to obtain exact figures on the increase of the Hughes
family before finally leaving France’s rich Far-Eastern possession
behind. In contrast to all this, I was asked to show my passport once
during two years of roving in China, and the asker was quite contented
with a visiting card instead.
It was a noisy night about our frail little cabins on the _Mekong_, and
dawn found us anchored at Mytho, to which we could easily have taken a
train from Saïgon that morning in time to board the craft before she
pushed off again. Because the Messageries Fluviales have a monopoly on
the rivers of Indo-China against which even the French, of unofficial
standing, protest loudly but in vain, travelers pay high for the
thirty-six-hour journey from the capital of Cochinchina to that of
Cambodia on these rather uncomfortable little river steamers. But again,
why trouble with colonies and protectorates if they give no monopolies?
For that matter the French steamers between Marseilles and Shanghai
charge more for the passage from Hong Kong or Singapore to Saïgon than
between those two British ports, where competition reigns.
All day we plowed our way, with frequent stops, up a wide river through
a dead-flat palm-tree and banana country. Between halts there was little
of interest except our fellow-passengers, and even they were not
particularly unique. Eight travelers lolled in the breeze under the
tarpaulin above the first-class deck, to which our complexions confined
those of us of so-called European race. Besides the young American lady
and her chaperoning compatriot, there was an English couple to whom
tropical travel was an ordeal to be endured only because Angkor is
something one must see. Made miserable by every deviation from the
accustomed ways of their foggy native land, Mr. and Mrs.—shall we say
Piffton-Smith? no matter what, so long as we do not forget the hyphen
and disgrace them by the mere name of Smith—suffered acutely from
everything: the French food, the French meal-hours, the French language,
the delightful climate, even the friendly little ants in the cabins.
What a pity one cannot find everything just as it is at home when off on
one’s travels in quest of the strange and the different! Only by
constant mention of their youthful daughter, Lady So-and-so, recently
married to the far from youthful governor of—er—a British crown colony,
could Mrs. Piffton-Smith endure the martyrdom at all. One must not
forget that daughter any more than the hyphen, though for that matter
there was little danger of doing either; trust Mrs. Piffton-Smith for
that. It was evident that no one in the family had ever been a Lady
before.
But let us be charitable; perhaps it is not merely the women of
foot-bound China who have more cause for complaint than the favored sex.
While we mere men had to use our oven-like little cabin only as
dressing-rooms between a day of loafing and a night of sleeping on the
cot-provided deck, the ladies were cruelly confined during their
nightgowned hours. Three lively young French officers on a furlough from
their regiments, one of whom spoke excellent English, completed the
cabin passenger list. French soon came to seem the natural tongue, so
that the Piffton-Smiths had new cause for complaint in being left out of
the conversation. Under the back awning behind the orange-box
“staterooms” was a much larger collection of passengers, untroubled with
cabins, cots, or the fear of creasing their garments. As the day wore
on, the human type there gradually changed. The throng grew less Chinese
as Annamese travelers wandered ashore at the frequent stopping-places,
became more Hindu, more Aryan, the eyes large and straight, with well
defined eyebrows, mustaches shading the lips of the men, some with
almost Russian beards. Those rare inhabitants of the banks, half seen
through the trees and reeds, also took on Aryan features, for all their
chocolate color.
Daylight found us at Pnom Penh, capital of the French protectorate of
Cambodia. It was a calm, well kept little city, with hardly any of the
hubbub of China and none of its filth—at least within sight. The air was
less deadening than at Saïgon, less charged with electricity and
water-vapor, though still so hot that there was no joy in doing anything
equal to the joy of doing nothing. Half a dozen wide streets, much
shaded by trees, invited the stroller about a town in many ways quite
up-to-date, pleasant as it was with tropical languor. Pnom Penh has been
called the Little Bangkok, as Saïgon is the Little Paris. I was at last
completely beyond Chinese civilization, though there were some Chinese
residents, mainly merchants; most of the commerce of Cambodia is in
Celestial hands. White people were not numerous, but there were plenty
of other foreigners—black and brown French soldiers from other colonies,
representatives of nearly all the lands of the Far East. Yet all other
races stood out merely as individuals among the Cambodians, so closely
related to the Siamese in clothing, language, the uneven pompadour
hair-cuts of the women. With rather stupid faces from the mouths of
which dripped betel-nut juice, above perhaps the ugliest female costumes
in the world, ending in the inevitable _sampot_, a kind of pants-skirt
drawn up between the legs and tucked in behind, they were far from
attractive. Gentle effeminate-looking men with long bobbed hair or black
tresses wound together in a knot at the back of the neck meandered about
between the shafts of rickshaws or toiled slowly about the
steamer-landing.
The first men in the flowing saffron robes of Gautama whom I had seen in
the two decades since my Siamese journey—though I had seen Buddhist
priests and to spare—stood out against the less gaudily garbed laymen.
The bonzes are the bosses of the country—always of course after the
French. There had been sixty thousand of them in Cambodia the year
before, for the Cambodians are very religious. But they pay no taxes,
and under the French they are gradually being _supprimés_, so that now
they were reduced to 42,250, according to official statistics. Still,
these languid beings in bright yellow robes, often set off by red, rose,
purple, and other draperies, with shaven heads and Hindu skins, were by
no means scarce. Groups of them with their begging-bowls stood before
many a shop and house while the sun was still low, sauntering on to make
their silent plea to others after a handful of rice or a saucer of
cooked fish had been poured into their bowls by the pious inmates.
There was something very French about Pnom Penh, for all its very
Oriental aspect. French bread was on sale everywhere; the “Grand Hôtel,
N. Manolis, Propriétaire,” might, like all the others in Indo-China,
have been in Paris—except for the heat—tourist prices and all. Here
again were the same marble-topped tables, the same zinc _comptoir_
presided over by a sharp-eyed and caustic-minded matron, the same flimsy
newspapers in awkward holders, the same letter-paper headed by an
advertisement of the Maison Dubonnet. Fortunately we were sailing again
that evening and needed its monopolistic accommodations only in the way
of food and drink. Midday, with its lassitude, its invincible
somnolence, followed so closely upon the déjeuner, however, that its
shelter, and at least the repose offered by its chairs, with the
marble-topped tables serving as props, were essential. The most ardent
sight-seer could hardly have found pleasure in roaming about Pnom Penh
with the unclouded equatorial sun directly overhead. Dinner in the
evening was to the strains of a native orchestra that might have done
worse, and a veritable stage-lighting effect was produced by the
swirling wings of the big electric fans suspended from the ceiling amid
clouds of insects.
Pressed by his more belligerent neighbors, Norodom, king of Cambodia,
placed his country under the protection of the French in 1863, and since
then the nominal ruler is merely a play king. The real boss is the
_résident supérieur_ sent out from France. It goes without saying that
the royal figurehead is surrounded by all the riches and sumptuous state
which the French and his own doting subjects can supply him, while the
“protector” does all the work. The arrangement seems to be much like
that between the couple who agreed that one should decide all the small
questions and the other all the large, and so far there have been no
small questions in Cambodian affairs. Old pagodas of the Burmese rather
than the Chinese style stand forth here and there in the older part of
the capital as a reminder of independent days when a head fell at the
motion of the kingly finger. But most of Pnom Penh dates from the years
of the protectorate. Little more than half a century has passed since
Norodom confided his country to France, and already much that the French
built in the capital has taken on an air of age, under the perpetually
burning sun and the seasonal rains that drive vegetation to
super-vegetable performance. The beautifully straight streets traced by
the French, so out of proportion with the population that passes along
them, are green with grass outside the busiest section. In the far
outskirts hover the thatched huts, often on stilts, of the mass of the
population.
The gilded steeples of the throne-room, however, within the great royal
inclosure, infallibly draw the eye that catches them. This and several
others of the palaces are so new that they were not finished when the
World War broke out, and two of them still had scaffolds about their
needle-pointed spires and along their swift golden roofs. Inside the
outer wall of the inclosure runs a long series of life-sized paintings
from the sacred texts, before which groups of pilgrims bow down in
worship, and squat in contented repose during the hours of siesta. One
of the palaces has a silver floor thirty-six by a hundred and twenty
feet, the solid silver _dalles_ half an inch thick. A gold Buddha,
studded with diamonds, that is said to be worth sixty million piastres
is among the many precious things, as well as much tinsel, inside the
plain bright-yellow walls of the palaces, to which there are no real
barricades. Cases containing jewels of great price in the Silver Temple
are not locked, but are protected merely by pasted strips of paper, with
the name of the guardian written on them. The Cambodians still consider
their king so sacred that they never steal his possessions, and alien
thieves seem never to get this far afield. Of the far-famed Footprint of
Buddha within its own special pagoda there is nothing to say except that
it is about six feet long, in solid rock, studded with jewels, with the
toes all exactly of the same length.
Our day in Pnom Penh was well chosen, for in the afternoon the king had
a dance performed in the wall-less pavilion of the palace grounds for
the pleasure of visiting French and British officers. It was a far
different dance from those which kings of Europe give in honor of
visitors. While the white strangers in town sat as at a tennis
tournament beneath the shade of the pavilion roof in seats provided for
those who do not naturally squat, two girls, the youngest hardly in her
teens, appeared in the center of the floor. Among his other playthings
the octogenarian king chooses annually two hundred and forty girls from
the prettiest of the upper class, to be trained to dance before him. But
either his eyesight is poor, the choice extremely limited, or he had
deliberately set out to insult these guests foisted upon him by the
French rulers, for even a popular novelist could not have called this
chosen pair beautiful. Flour, or some white powder closely resembling
it, covered their faces in ghastly thoroughness, faces in which not the
suggestion of an expression seemed to be permitted by the rules of
Cambodian dancing, and flour in which streams of sweat cut strange
arabesques during the ceremony. On their heads were replicas of the very
pointed steeples of the throne-room; costumes gaudy with gold and many
colors, quite unlike the every-day dress of Cambodian women, somewhat
resembling in fact the garb of a Spanish toreador, covered them from
neck to knees. Two big silver anklets clinked above each of their bare
feet. It was a costume by no means scanty enough for the climate, and if
the truth must be told at all costs there was a conspicuous call for
soap and water just where their floured faces joined the gaudily garbed
bodies.
Dancing? Yes, perhaps, for want of a word more exactly descriptive. It
really was posturing, more or less to the rhythm of an orchestra of
native players on strange instruments squatted on the floor at one end
of the open pavilion. There was never a quick movement, not a hint of
animation in the white faces, though there was considerable expression
in the lithe arms and posturing bodies; more, no doubt, than we ignorant
Western spectators suspected. But it was impossible to picture the
youths in an American dance-hall even suspecting, to say nothing of
admitting, that this was dancing. Through it all an old woman tossed
from the side-lines, like a football coach, hints to the perspiring and
apparently stiffly embarrassed performers. Little by little all the
rabble in town sneaked up, noiseless on bare feet, and squatted just
within the shade along one side of the pavilion. Cambodia’s king, one
gathered, was democratic in his attitude. The only element of the
population lacking before the ceremony ended were the priests in their
yellow robes; like their colleagues of Spain on the day of the
bull-fight, they may not morally mingle with the laymen during such
ceremonies.
Old King Sisowath himself was not there, except perhaps in spirit. His
eighty-four years made him chary of excitement. But before we went off
to the later afternoon band concert in a park at the other side of town
we had seen his crown, his seven parasols in as many different colors
for each day of the week, his two even more gaudy ones for fête days,
his two palanquins for state and ordinary occasions, and all those other
baubles which the tourist so often mistakes for the rewards of travel.
The Cambodian sovereign mounts his throne only once in his life, even so
long a life as Sisowath’s—at his coronation. On other days he holds
audience sitting on a cushion at the foot of it. Yet barefooted servants
wandered about dusting and fingering everything, reminding one that even
emperors must have charwomen. Crude, violent colors were much in
evidence. When the king goes forth in state both he and his chair are so
covered with gold and precious stones that the eye quails before him in
this equatorial sunlight. Poor old figurehead! Little did Norodom dream
to what depths his demand for French protection would so soon sink his
successors. Nothing is more symbolical of the real position of old
Sisowath than the well known story of how his favorite concubine yielded
to the urgings of a young French official on the steamer bringing his
Majesty back from Paris a few years ago, and of the king’s impotence to
punish either of them.
The _Barsac_ was somewhat more comfortable than the _Mekong_, though the
mother of Lady So-and-so would not admit it. No doubt this was because
it confined itself almost entirely to carrying visitors to Angkor rather
than making its passengers adjuncts of its freight. A pilot in the
head-dress of a Chinese nurse-maid, a sailor adorned with a West Indian
bandana, short-haired women and all but naked men paddling about in
dugout canoes of very fat belly and narrow upturned ends, sometimes with
a supercilious drone in a yellow robe among them, mildly enlivened the
early hours next morning. The larger boats were pushed along by one oar
in the hands of a standing boatman, or boat-woman, as in China, and
Venice. Flocks of white birds almost like seagulls skimmed across the
yellowish water; all was pleasant as long as we kept moving; only the
breezeless halts were painful.
It was in fact a beautiful day’s sail up across the Tonlé Sap, the Great
Lake formed by the Mekong in high-water time, now nearing its close.
This mid-January excursion was indeed probably the last to Angkor for
the season, unless later travelers succeeded in making the journey by
automobile along the new road soon to be completed. In place of houses
on pole legs, twelve or fifteen feet above the ground, there came
floating villages, scores of houses tightly bound together. Enormous
quantities of fish are taken in the receding waters, and as the lake at
its height covers vast areas the population is reduced to this form of
earning a livelihood. The fish heads are boiled for oil, the highly
offensive scent of which now and then reached our nostrils, and the
fish, gutted and salted, are sent to China and Singapore. Once the sea
covered this region, with only an island where there is now a part of
the mainland, so that salt-water fish are still caught in the lake, and
in the flood season freshwater fish are taken far out in the ocean.
All day we steamed through a veritable Gatun Lake, now with jungle and
an occasional floating village on one side, now with a hazy range of
hills far off on the left, sometimes with nothing but the yellowish
waters as far as the eye could see. Occasionally there was not even a
junk in sight, no more trace of man than before his appearance among the
terrestrial fauna; at other times the great expanse, broad as a sea, was
flecked with sail-boats with almost diamond-shaped sails. But the
flooded forest was not dead or dying as at Gatun, for the waters recede
in time each year to save it from extinction.
We were to have reached Angkor toward the noon following our evening
departure from Pnom Penh; but I for one was glad we spent all the day
sailing across the Great Lake, if only for the sunset. The lake was flat
as glass, one side lost on an ocean-like horizon, the other a low
distant endless line of trees. A delicate lilac spread along all the rim
of the sky; then on the western side the limpid air became pink, and
almost suddenly everything was tinged with this color: the surface of
the lake itself, the entire circle of horizon, every tiniest fleck of
cloud in the sky above. Ahead, a line of beautiful green showed the
endlessness of the drowned forest; on the west, in contrast, there came
a quick heaping up of masses of dark, chaotic, terrifying, gigantic
things which stood upright and seemed to weigh upon the waters, like
fantastic blocks of mountains, standing out as clearly as if their
summits were painted along the clear sky, yet looking as if they were
preparing for a formidable crumbling away, such as one might fancy the
end of the world to be. Gradually, like some mammoth holocaust, the
blood-red sun burned its way down into the clouds massed along the
western horizon, clouds which outdid themselves in strange shapes, from
impossible crags, on which trees seemed to be falling in rapid
succession, to snow-clads farther off; and then, after it had been gone
entirely for a while and one thought it had disappeared below the edge
of the earth, the sun reappeared, a demon face red with rage peering
forth as from a cave, from which it advanced down to the very water’s
edge, spilling blood far out across the lake. Then red chaos, and
purple, and lilac, and finally soft mauve night.
Not long afterward we got off into sampans with happy laughing rowers
and went away through the inundated forest, among great trees bathing
clear to their upper branches, the water under their armpits, or only
their heads emerging, like modest women. Higher rose the ever thicker
forest close about us; we found ourselves ascending a narrowing stream;
and at length, soon after the moon appeared, we bumped against something
more or less resembling a pier. It was the end of an excellent road,
raised high on an embankment for some distance, and we climbed into—ah,
well, it is a small commonplace world at best, this twentieth-century
globe, even in its most distant recesses—into what our English friends
called motor-cars, though they were those more than familiar things
built by an inventive and once eccentric but now widely known
ex-Sunday-school teacher of Detroit, and were off for a moonlight ride
behind a careful chauffeur who wore no shoes. It was a tepid night,
dotted with fireflies, the musical silence forming an undertone to the
droning of the cars broken now and again by the soughing of big
water-wheels raising water from the small river that turned them. In the
palm-tree jungle on either side we made out many little houses on
slender legs, the inhabitants of both sexes lolling or strolling in a
single piece each of Scotchy plaid wrapped about them like a short
skirt.
It was nearly eleven at night when we reached the _sala_, a comfortable
spreading bungalow erected by the French for the accommodation of the
fussy modern visitors to Angkor. Two decades ago Pierre Loti took all
day along that road in a jolting two-wheeled ox-cart, and put up in the
stilt-legged shack of Buddhist monks. But we had arrived at a lucky
moment, as was evident from the sounds of revelry by night that came to
us from beyond the moat just across the road from the _sala_. It was a
supernaturally broad moat, looking at least a hundred yards wide in the
light of the full moon that drifted lazily across a great building
rising to pointed towers that bulked forth out of the night far beyond.
An ancient stone causeway across it led to this gigantic structure of
Angkor-Vat, before the partly ruined front doorway of which a
torch-lighted throng was gathered. Visitors who had come before us,
headed by a French novelist and the queenly wife of the governor of
Cochinchina, had sent to Siem Réap at the edge of the Great Lake for
Cambodian dancers, and with them had come fifty boys bearing torches and
most of the native population of the district.
There were a score of girls in the gaudy garments and the steeple-shaped
head-dress of the calling, chewing betel-nut, and giggling like a bevy
of New York typists as they danced, though the rules call for silence
and wholly expressionless faces. Banked behind a dozen seated Europeans
in white, and forming a compact circle around them and the dancers, two
or three hundred natives of both sexes squatted or stood, many with
naked youngsters between their knees. Small boys with blazing torches
outlined the inner arc of the circle; the little torch-bearers squatted
on the flagstones formed an enchanted circle of flames tapering upward
to smoke about the dancers. Some of the spectators had taken places on
the steps and the balustrade of the bridge; other half-naked Cambodians,
and Annamese with their effeminate knots of hair, gave the gathering a
ragged fringe. The ancient temple seemed to have returned to life, the
days of very long ago to live again; it was easy to imagine these living
dancers the descendants of those carved in stone on the pillars in the
background, for all their black teeth and what looked like
blood-dripping mouths.
The Annamese spectators were solemn, like men so impressed with their
own importance that they dare not break their dignity; the Cambodians
were simple happy children, taking the joys of life as they come and
giving no more thought to to-morrow than to stone-dead yesterday. The
croaking of frogs in the broad shallow moat mingled with that of some
loud-voiced species of cricket; birds of the night passed overhead with
a startled cry—or was it applause?—at the strange scene below, profaning
the great doorway of the dead temple. Beneath the brilliant tropical
moon that all but blotted out the Southern Cross well above the horizon,
the floured faces of the dancers took on, now a ghastly, now a clownish
aspect, as they posed and postured, moving noiselessly in their bare
feet slowly to and fro on the century-worn stone pavement. Dressed like
the Hindu gods they seemed to be impersonating, they undulated back and
forth on the glass-smooth stones, their supple arms waving as if they
were mere antennæ without rigidity anywhere, in contrast to their
stiffly immovable bodies.
There was a story to be read, evidently, in their deliberate
pantomiming, a solemn if not a tragic tale, for all the occasional
bursts of embarrassed or prankish giggling, like plantation darkies at a
cotton-field celebration. One gathered that a demon with several faces
wished to carry off Siva, beautiful lady-love of Rama, and when the two
rivals of the ancient legend faced each other with threatening gestures
all the childish part of the audience began to shriek, as at the meeting
of hero and villain in a Punch-and-Judy show or at the movies. Indeed
the spectacle was insured against flagging interest by the behavior of
the rapt happy throng in the flickering light before the ancient temple
more than by the dancers it encircled. Young and old seemed to follow
the story easily; to us Westerners without their background of ancient
legends and Oriental symbolism it was merely a picturesque scene, made
doubly fantastic by the circle of torches and weird with the thump of
tom-toms that lasted deep into the night.