THE JUNGLE-GUARDED RUINS OF ANGKOR
Soon after sunrise next morning Fords carried us off to some of the more
distant ruins of the ancient city buried in tropical forest. With the
heart of the day unbearable in the sunshine, it is wise as well as
customary to get under way early at Angkor, and French breakfasts are
brief, if not quite to the point. An excellent road, considering the
place and the climate, set off close along the sides of the moat, then
shot off at a tangent at the second corner. An abnormally broad moat it
still seemed, wide as the Panama Canal even by sunlight; and it was all
but covered with water-cress and beautiful white and pink lilies, or
their tropical counterparts.
To visit Angkor is no longer a proof of prowess, except of the
Ford-endurance needed to make the circuit of ruins covering forty
kilometers of throttling forest-jungle. Even as recently as the
beginning of the present century visitors had to scramble through the
wilderness about Angkor as best they could. To-day there is a network of
good roads, French even to their sign-boards, to all the important
ruins, with so few ox-carts or other native traffic on them now that
they are almost as commonplace as our national highways—until suddenly
they burst out again upon some other mammoth ruin.
Described by a Chinese traveler two hundred years before America was
officially discovered, and many times since, Angkor is still little
known to the world at large, though it is perhaps the greatest
collection of ruins on earth. Neither Java nor India can show so
extensive and so perfectly preserved an architectural ensemble; Machu
Picchu, similarly lost in dense tropical forest, though high up among
the great ranges of the Andes instead of down at the dead-flat sea-level
of Angkor, is a mere village by comparison. Once this Khmer city, buried
for centuries and long left to desolation, was one of the splendors of
the world. Its monuments still tell the story of the luxury of its royal
and military life; its carvings give an inventory of its riches, from
jewels to dancing-girls. The least observing must soon realize that this
was once the heart of a magnificent kingdom; and what an immense city it
was—and is. Angkor-Thom was larger than the Rome of Augustus; the great
temple of Angkor-Vat alone has a space four times as large as the Place
de la Concorde, which is larger than Columbus Circle.
It seems that about the time of Alexander the Macedonian a people
apparently detached many centuries before from the great Aryan race
migrated from the direction of India and came to plant itself on the
shores of this great river, the lower Mekong. Others say that when India
and Burma were being conquered by barbarians at about the time of Christ
these Khmer came down from northeast Burma, hillmen with a virility that
has since died out, so that they in their turn have now long since been
conquered, as they subjugated and mixed with the unspoiled aborigines of
this region, “men with little eyes who worshiped serpents.” On what
queer bases are civilizations built! Just as the old Nile, with its silt
alone, caused a marvelous civilization to grow up in its narrow valley,
here the Mekong, spreading out its waters year after year, deposited the
richness that prepared the wealthy empire of the Khmer. The city of
Angkor-Thom (Angkor the Great), capital of this empire, reached the
nadir of its glory between the ninth and twelfth centuries of our era.
The Khmer brought with them the gods of Brahmanism, the beautiful
legends of the Ramayana, which seem to have come to them through the
Hindus at about the time of Christ, and as their opulence grew in this
fertile delta of the Mekong each king vied with his predecessors in
clearing away the forest and in building everywhere magnificently
decorated palaces, and gigantic temples chiseled with thousands of
figures.
Some centuries later—no one knows exactly when, for the existence of
this once important people is largely effaced from the memory of man—the
powerful sovereigns of Angkor saw arrive from the West missionaries in
bright yellow robes, bearers of a new light at which the Asiatic world
was just then marveling. The savage temples of Brahma became Buddhist
temples; the statues of their altars changed their attitudes, lowering
their eyes and softening their faces with gentle smiles. The Khmer
empire of the Mekong delta appears to have started on the downward path
during our thirteenth century. The history of its rapid and mysterious
decline has never been fully written, and the invading forest guards the
secret of most of it. There are evidences of a connection between it and
the history of China; for it was not long after the Tai or Laos race
that we commonly call the Siamese, masters even of Canton until 1053
A.D., were driven out of what is now southwestern China by a series of
battles along the West River, that the Khmers were in their turn
dispossessed by this hardier though fleeing people. Time had moved
swiftly with them. At least in the art of their monuments the Khmer were
at their height during the twelfth century, and by the fourteenth they
were so weak, perhaps because of the softening influence of tropical
living, that they fled before the Siamese and founded a new capital to
the southward. The little Cambodia of to-day, conserver of complicated
rites the sense of which is almost completely lost, is the last remnant
of this once powerful empire of the Khmer, which for more than five
hundred years has ebbed away, until it has been all but extinguished
under the silence of trees and mosses.
From the end of the fourteenth century Angkor belonged to Siam, which
changed its name and set over it a king of its own. Since then the great
palaces and temples had been left to time and tropical vegetation, until
little more than half a century ago the first European discovered, ruin
by ruin, this marvelous city lost in inextricable jungle. This
rediscovery is credited to Henri Mouhot, in 1861; but it was not until
1910 that the uncovering of the ruins began. Annamese armies had long
invaded Cochinchina, then a part of Cambodia, and to save herself from
complete destruction the weakened nation became a protectorate of
France, barely a year after Mouhot’s explorations. Angkor still belonged
to Siam; but some wise Frenchman seems to have discovered that it was
formerly a part of Cambodia and insisted on a return to the ancient
_status quo_; or on applying that doctrine of “self-determination” on
which unimperialistic France is so strongly set. At any rate Siam was
“induced,” by the treaty of 1907, to “give back” to Cambodia all
Battambang Province, including the Angkor region. Then communication was
opened to the ruins, which had been at the mercy of the elements for
nearly a thousand years.
Yet they were not so badly ruined as they might have been. When the
Khmer fled before the Siamese of the fourteenth century they could
hardly have expected that their architectural marvels would merely be
swallowed up by the voracious forest, but rather that they would be
destroyed root and branch; and probably for generations they thought
this had happened. But even the destroying of such massive works of
stone is hard labor in an equatorial land, and the Siamese confined
themselves to the destruction of the buildings of a political nature and
left untouched the temples and other religious monuments. Buddhism was
less respectful, for all its gentleness, and caused many of the Brahman
glories to disappear, or replaced them with Buddhist statues and tawdry
trappings.
There are monuments vying in size and artistry with the best the ancient
world has to offer, scattered through all the forest-jungle over nearly
twenty square miles. The French have done a splendid job in uncovering
and restoring these marvels of the past. We of the land of boasted
efficiency would probably have cleared away and restored too much, for
comfort and convenience’ sake, and spoiled the effect. In places even
the French archæologists have in their professional zeal driven off the
forest too ruthlessly, and left some ruins in the sad state of nudity of
a stone quarry. But in most cases they have been thoughtful as well as
careful. Great green plumes waved high over our heads as we sped along
by road or strolled by side-trail to mammoth ruin after ruin. Trees that
would be giants beside any of those of northern climes except our
redwoods carried without apparent effort mighty loads of vines and
parasites that would have stifled the sturdiest elm or oak. All this
vegetation gave one the feeling of being so completely surrounded that
he might never get out of it again; yet it was not such a forest-riotous
wilderness as I had expected, and it was hard to believe that herds of
wild elephants were trampling it down only a few miles away. Here and
there were expanses of natural half-clearing; white birds in flocks
escorted water-buffaloes through swamps that might almost have been
passable by Ford.
Yet there was a greater rage for destruction among the plants than had
ever been shown by the Siamese. The Prince of Death, Siva of the
Brahmans, has given to each beast the special enemy which eats it, to
each creature its destroying microbes; and he seems to have foreseen
that puny man would try to prolong himself a little by constructing
durable things, and imagined a thousand destructive agents to annihilate
his efforts. Huge trees which the French call _fromagers_—though I saw
no cheese upon them, and our own name of “silk-cotton tree” seems more
justified—their trunks as if whitewashed, or spotted with leprosy, or,
more exactly still, as if they had been painted in lilac and cream by
some fantastic-minded artist, roam the ruins with their buttress roots.
Queerly grown in and over the great stone piles like inquisitive
serpents, these roots have in some cases wandered thirty yards away in
search of sustenance. Laocoön roots lifted great stones in their
embrace; one had disdainfully shoved aside a huge pillar and taken on
the job of supporting the mass of masonry itself. The banyan, with its
aerial roots, does not overthrow the ruins; it gathers them, strains
them to its bosom, as it were, so that enormous heaps of rocks that
would otherwise long since have fallen apart still maintain the form the
Khmer gave them. Trickery rather than force characterizes even the
vegetation here in the tropics, though the trees too have learned to
fight when necessary. The more brutal _fromager_ bursts walls asunder by
the slow force of its growing trunk, squeezes ancient buildings to death
like the boa-constrictor, swallows them in its great maw. Especially
what the French call the “fig-tree of ruins” is irresistible; it reigns
as master to-day at Angkor. In the beginning it was only a little seed,
sowed by the wind on a frieze or the top of a tower. But from there its
roots, like steel cables, have insinuated themselves between the stones,
descending by a sure instinct toward the earth; and having at last
reached it, they have grown quickly from its nourishing soil and become
enormous, disrupting, unbalancing everything, opening thick walls from
top to bottom, sometimes completely destroying the edifice. Among the
palaces, above the temples it has so patiently disintegrated, it spreads
its pale smooth branches with their serpent spottings, and shades the
débris with its superb broad domes of foliage as with great green
parasols.
Here and there along the roads and trails magnificent trees have been
mutilated by man, rare and furtive as he is in these parts. Deep holes
are burned in many a trunk in order to collect in earthenware pots resin
for the making of candles, as the Landais of France gather pitch from
their pine-trees. Now and then the road is straddled by stone gateways
above which smile huge human faces with long tresses of lianas. But for
all the centuries they have had free play, neither the slow encroachment
of the forest and jungle nor the heavy dissolving rains have been able
to wipe out the impression of Angkor-Thom as a city of splendid
architecture, or the ironic bonhomie, as Pierre Loti calls it, of these
mammoth stone faces, much more disquieting than the grimaces of the
monsters of China.
Though they were remarkable architects, the Khmer were rather poor
masons. They knew no more of how to build a vault than by piling up huge
stone after stone in horizontal layers, each reaching a little farther
out toward the center. Their arches are crude, made of immense stones
laid one on top of another, and instead of a keystone they simply placed
a larger stone on top. Their total work is all the more surprising, and
its duration that much more marvelous, their roofs, though they must
always have leaked, as they do now, all the more wonderful because the
Khmer so little knew how to build them. Some have been shored up by the
French; some of them were evidently repillared by the builders
themselves. Yet scores still stand, after nearly a thousand years,
without any such assistance.
Most of the stones themselves are not so well fitted as at Machu Picchu
in the Andes; but the decorations on them outdo anything the ancient
civilizations of the Western Hemisphere have to offer. The greatest art
of the Khmer was their taste in sculpture, the finish of their
execution, their treating of colossal things with the care and delicacy
of jewels. Everywhere are figures, bas-reliefs, carvings without end, so
delicately chiseled that one might think them lace pasted upon the
stone, façades as carefully worked as the most patient embroideries. The
stones all have round holes in them, suggesting how they may have been
carried to the places they were needed. The reddish, comparatively soft,
sandstone or composite of which much of Angkor-Thom was built is common
in this part of the world. A French geologist asserts that it is old
lava. Yet the task of building such a city even with that was a task
indeed in such a climate.
All that first morning, and the next, we kept coming upon new masses of
striking architecture in the forest. Now and again the modern road ran
beneath towers bearing on each of their four sides mammoth human faces,
always alike and said to represent Brahma. Many single faces were carved
on eight, ten, a dozen huge stones awkwardly put together. These
Cambodian _préasats_, as archæologists call them, whether or not they
are adorned with the quadruple face of Brahma, are as characteristic of
Khmer art as the palm-tree is of the Cambodian landscape. In one place
the road was flanked by a great stone balustrade, a hundred yards long,
and by the remnants of what was once another, each in the form of a
gigantic cobra with raised head, upheld in the arms of a score of
mammoth stone men. The cobra-head motif everywhere suggested a former
ardent worship of snakes; human figures with a beak in place of a nose
were almost as common. One great wall was covered with a procession of
life-size elephants; beyond were walls formed inside and out of
thousands of closely set Hindu figures. Here and there were suggestions
of the Maya ruins of Central America, but this probably proves merely
that minds which have reached a similar development run in similar
channels, rather than that tropical people of a millennium ago crossed
the great ocean.
The tourist-minded Fords rushed us about all the Saturday and Sunday
mornings following our arrival, but left us to our own devices the rest
of the four days. The _sala_ where they duly deposited us again after
each flight outdid the best hotels of Indo-China, except that the
roosters housed just behind it might have been spared. But guests of
course must have their eggs and their roast chicken, and no Frenchman
would be so cruel as to deprive even a hen of its mate. Every living
being, European or native, retired immediately after the eleven o’clock
_déjeuner_ and did not rise again until two or three in the afternoon.
To think of doing anything else was all but impossible, to say nothing
of actually doing it. Not even the Cambodians, used to this climate at
least for centuries, seemed able to endure those burning hours out of
doors. For all my tropical experience I soon found that the only way to
bear life during that atrocious period was to revert to the reputed
costume of Adam before the unfortunate apple episode, turn the electric
fan squarely upon my recumbent form inside the mosquito-net, and succumb
to the fond hope of perhaps getting a nap.
Those of us who knew nothing of real hardships also fancied we suffered
one other terrible infliction in that otherwise comfortable bungalow.
The French food naturally was good, with neither wine nor ice lacking,
but the principal meal was made so miserable by swarms of mosquitoes
under the tables that poor Mrs. Piffton-Smith—though of course she would
violently resent the adjective—had to wear even at dinner the oven-like
riding-boots she endured among the ruins out of an abject fear of
“reptiles,” though, except for the stone cobras, the less imaginative of
us never saw so much as a fleeing serpent’s tail. If there were duly
presented newcomers at table she mitigated her martyrdom somewhat by
frequent references to her daughter Lady So-and-so, wife of Lord
So-and-so, governor of—and so on. But few travelers came after us; Mrs.
P.-S. naturally knew no French, and obviously she could not speak to
strangers without the formal introduction that was often lacking; and
those of us who had long since learned that extraordinary daughter by
heart were not, I fear, very sympathetic listeners even to new anecdotes
concerning the Lady of the family. Those of the women who had no such
antidote for those mosquito-tortured hours wrapped napkins, newspapers,
anything at all, about their legs, and burned under the table
joss-sticks enough to supply a Chinese temple, being unjustly denied the
male privilege of relieving their nerves by such remarks as now and then
rose from a man who, driven beyond endurance, tried a slap or two—and
left a splotch of blood on his white trousers.
After my first drenched nap I set out to roam through Angkor-Vat, most
striking of all the ruins scattered over that twenty square miles of
tropical forest. Vat, by the way, is the Cambodian and Siamese word for
temple. Just across the lake-like moat, with its shimmering watery
carpet of lilies and water-cress, on the outer shore of which the _sala_
sits, the mighty building was heaped into the sky in the center of the
only real clearing in the region. From the big stone doorway of long ago
through which one emerges upon the great stone bridge and causeway
leading to it, the central mass ahead bore a certain resemblance to the
Kremlin; yet that is small beside it. The enormous stone slabs of the
causeway were worn smooth as polished marble, in places even hollowed
out, by the feet of men and women and elephants already dead a thousand
years. For the few shod tourists who have followed it during the past
decade can scarcely have made more impression on those cyclopean blocks
than do the bare feet of pilgrims and of the bonzes in their yellow
robes who still patter along it. Strange processions indeed must have
trodden this aged causeway, flanked by a massive railing of gigantic
stone cobras standing sentinel with raised heads—seven heads each,
spread out like fans, the necks swollen as when the deadly snake is
ready to strike.
Life had become endurable again, yet the afternoon heat from the stones
blazed upon all day by an unclouded equatorial sun was a succession of
physical blows as distinct as my heavy Western footsteps along the
causeway toward the basilic phantom ahead. Once inside the inner
inclosure, this gigantic edifice dominated everything, a more impressive
sight, in its way, than the Taj Mahal itself, as beautiful, almost as
symmetrical, losing mainly by over-elaboration. Nowhere in the world
perhaps has man piled up so many stones as in this mountain-temple.
Crushing masses of sculptured rocks, terraces, stone-carved bas-reliefs,
stairways leading swiftly upward into towers that seem to scrape the
cloudless heavens, gave me a feeling akin to depression. At first sight
all one’s impressions were jumbled together; disorder and confusion
seemed to emanate from this hill of chiseled blocks. It is not simple in
its lines, like Thebes and Baalbek, like Machu Picchu and the Taj Mahal,
but has the exuberance, the dismaying complications of Hindu art, so
that it is not merely by its enormity that it staggers the beholder. He
who tries to see it all at once suffers the fatigue so common in
museums; one must come back often, each time studying a little of it in
detail, and then gradually a perfect symmetry asserts itself.
Two monsters, darkened by centuries and bearded with lichen, though
under the French they are now shaved from time to time, guard the front
entrance to the temple itself, like dragons stationed before legendary
grottoes. The base of this mighty pyramid of a structure is more than a
kilometer square, and completely about it runs a great gallery that
stretches far to right and to left from the four entrances on as many
sides of the building. Beneath the tropical sky without a fleck of cloud
that never for an instant left us during those four Angkor days the
mountain-temple glowed with a golden-brown radiance, so that the
greenish demi-day that suddenly replaced the glaring sunshine outside
gave one the impression of entering a subterranean passage, though on
the outside there are merely massive pillars. Those galleries
surrounding the main structure are nearly three quarters of a mile in
length, and for the entire circuit every inch of the wall is carved with
an endless bas-relief giving the whole history of the Khmer up to the
building of Angkor-Vat, the whole story of the greatest Hindu legend.
For the incredible chiseled painting along the four outer walls of the
temple has for its inspiration one of the noblest and most ancient epics
conceived by the men of Asia, those Aryan ancestors of ours—the
Ramayana. The uninterrupted bas-relief unrolls as long as the legs will
carry one, an inextricable series of battles, warriors gesticulating
with fury, combatants by the thousand, caparisoned elephants, ancient
engines of war, war chariots with wheels strangely up-to-date,
interminable scenes fleeing forever ahead in straight perspective, until
they seem still more infinitely long than they really are.
This wall of endless carvings looks like a single piece for hundreds of
yards. One must look closely to discover the joints between the enormous
stones put together without cement, yet adjusted with a precision as
rigorous as in the monuments of Egyptian antiquity. I found myself often
comparing with Machu Picchu this gigantic heap of sculptured stones, and
at least in this encircling wall of Angkor-Vat the stone-fitting was
equal to that at which the few visitors to the long lost city of the
Andes have marveled.
There are indeed two miles of galleries in the Vat, twenty-six thousand
feet of bas-reliefs chiseled in stone, archæologists tell us. All these
pictures were formerly painted or gilded, but they have been at the
mercy of the elements for nearly a thousand years, and have lost all the
brilliancy of the original colors. Sweating with the eternal humidity of
the tropics, the panoramas have taken on a sad blackish tint, with, in
places, the gleam of wet things. Then, too, up as high as the puny
mankind of to-day can reach, the bas-reliefs—five meters high on those
outer walls—are worn glass-smooth by the rubbing of secular fingers. In
times of pilgrimage the whole multitude makes it a duty to touch every
figure it can possibly reach. Here and there, in the parts lighted by
the beautiful little windows with thick carved-stone bars that are among
the chief glories of Angkor-Vat one may still see tracings of the
original coloring, on garments or faces; and sometimes, in the tiaras of
queens or goddesses, a little gold spared by the weather continues to
gleam after all these centuries.
In the middle of the face of each quadrilateral a portico opens in this
great gallery and gives access to a central court in which the temple
itself, properly speaking, rises, a prodigious heap of sculptured
sandstone climbing into the blue sky. The grandiose spreading out of the
courts of the second story and the formidable upward surge of the
central mass all but take the breath away. Such a complication of lines,
what a beauty for all the heaviness in the silent ensemble! The infinity
of decorations is incredible; the Khmer certainly did not pay their
workmen the union wages of to-day; for one thing there would not have
been so much care and artistry in the work. The building seems to have
been done by Cham and Tai prisoners of war and by regular levies of the
Khmer populace itself—much as black Christophe built his citadel in
Haiti. Evidently we must have some species of slavery to produce
monuments of this kind; “free” workmen cannot furnish the constant
enthusiasm and infinite care in details that they require. But in a way
those tropical toilers so long since returned to dust had things better
than our trade-union bricklayers of to-day, impossible as that may seem.
For the story goes that there was one architect for every five hundred
builders, and each of the builders had a hundred coolies to keep him
supplied with stone! Then artists came to cover every available surface,
with the care of painters working on canvas. For the Khmer were of the
Hindu point of view, abhorring simplicity and uncovered surfaces.
There are no obscenities among the myriad carvings of Angkor-Vat, even
from our Puritan point of view, though somehow one expects them. But the
Khmer kings evidently liked their musical comedies, or at least their
ballets, even as does the tired business man of to-day. For there are
Apsarases carved everywhere, in infinitely repeated groups, chiseled on
every side of every stone pillar, not merely here at Angkor-Vat but
throughout most of the ruins of Angkor-Thom, forever dancing before
their long departed masters. These perpetually virgin though constantly
violated nymphs of the Hindu paradise, everywhere sculptured in stone,
under the porticos, in the verandas, in the clear-obscure of the
galleries, beneath the hard sunshine that falls through crumbling
vaults, make the dead walls live. Everywhere they dance, among the
falling lianas, on the bases of temple altars, their arms supple, their
busts stiff and upright, as millenniums ago on the shores of the Ganges
for the amusement of Indra, as at Pnom Penh their living descendants
dance before the octogenarian king on the silver pavement of his
palace-temple. The artists of ancient times chiseled and polished as
lovingly as any modern sensuous denizen of the Latin Quarter these
dancing virgins—who can say what has become of the beautiful women from
whom these perfect torsos were copied?—and all these figures in
bracelets and rich adornments rather than clothing have been so often
caressed in the course of the bygone centuries that their beautiful bare
throats shine like polished marble. It is the women especially who,
during their pilgrimages, touch them passionately, begging from them the
gift of becoming mothers. Unfortunately, like those on the bas-reliefs
of Egypt, the feet of these lovely creatures are badly done, being
always drawn in profile even when the dancer is facing forward, so that
what might seem art to the followers of the reputedly funniest of our
“movie artists” merely testifies that the myriad beautiful stone
goddesses of Angkor were the work of a primitive humanity, still
struggling with the difficulties of design.
I raised my eyes to the mass above me, and almost without volition my
neck craned to its utmost that I might gaze upon the four giant towers,
topped by a central one still larger, in which the temple rises. Nothing
lives up there—except flocks of bats—and the stairways of startling
height fall under the ardent sun like a cascade of sandstone. The Khmer
were no more expert at making stairways than with roofs and arches and
the feet of their dancing-girls, and Angkor-Vat has the steepest stairs
in the world—even we who so love superlatives will not deny them this.
Stairs that are all but sheer walls lead to the lofty heights of this
mountain of a temple, stairs so steep that the knee-caps strike on the
step above, and so narrow that the foot can only be set down sidewise;
and even then there is many a slip, especially in descending. The bygone
architects should have been more thoughtful toward dizzy tourists; the
Piffton-Smiths never got above the ground floor at all—which was like
coming to Rome and going home again without seeing the Colosseum. Even
the surest-headed of us clung to the hand-polished old walls in
descending, losing our footing often on the worn and sometimes wet
steps.
One must climb these cascades of stone, too, between recumbent lions,
beasts suggesting Assyrian sacred bulls in stone, cobras spreading out
their seven heads like a fan above their angrily swollen necks, as well
as between smiling Apsarases, perpetually dancing for their long dead
masters. A hard climb, even for me, whose strength lies mainly in legs,
and I found myself on the first of three platforms, with a second story,
of a height double that of the first, defying me with still more abrupt
stairs, still more closely guarded by smiles and grimaces in stone. Then
when I certainly had the right to think that at last I had arrived,
there suddenly sprang up before me the third story, of a height double
that of the second! It was like climbing the Andes, like fronting life
and discovering to one’s astonishment that what at first looked like a
struggle, perhaps an insurmountable obstacle, is only the easy
preliminary to ever harder and higher tasks beyond. This progressive
doubling of the heights, from one story to another, was a clever
architectural discovery, enlarging the temple by an illusion from which
one cannot escape. The Khmer were clever architects, as I have said
before; and the memorable stairway that leads to the topmost platform,
with its narrow worn steps on which grass grows even while the French
are striving to keep this most magnificent of the monuments of Angkor
clear of it, while pilgrims and tourists are constantly going up and
down them, for their respective motives, is steep enough to give any one
vertigo; even the sailor we know as Pierre Loti found it so. “One would
say that the temple grows larger, prolongs itself indefinitely,
straining itself toward the heavens, so that climbing Angkor-Vat is like
those fatiguing nightmares in which one strives toward a goal that
forever flees on ahead. The gods no doubt wish to make themselves more
inaccessible the more one tries to approach them.”
There are four of these stairways, watched over by the enigmatically
smiling Apsarases, one on each side of the temple. As I mounted, the
forest seemed to mount with me, spreading out on all sides to the
horizon, unbroken as the sea clear to the circle of that horizon. The
topmost platform must be at least a hundred feet above the plain, yet
the great monument seems submerged, drowned in the midst of its verdure.
It is the greatest extent of forest I have ever seen, except perhaps
from the eastern slope of the Andes, where South America falls away into
the enormous Amazon basin that stretches to the Atlantic. Formerly, in
place of this silent sea of vegetation below, stretched the city of
Angkor-Thom, perhaps no more forested then than Peking or a New England
city to-day. If one could only push aside the roof of interlacing
branches one could still see beneath them the walls, terraces, temples,
the long paved avenues flanked by divinities in stone, balustrades,
gigantic serpents with raised heads, Brahma-faced towers, all now
swallowed up in the jungle. But the forest has become again what it was
for incalculable centuries before the beginning of man, so that nothing
visible remains of the work of those Hindu-like adventurers who many
hundred years ago came here to tempt fate and clear the space of a city
of nearly a million inhabitants. It endured only a millennium and a
half, that episode of the empire of the Khmer; in other words a very
negligible period compared with the longevity of the vegetable kingdom.
The scars are reclosed, nothing now appears for all their labors, and
the “fig-tree of ruins” spreads everywhere its parasol of green leaves.
It is true that in our day other adventurers, from far off to the West,
have founded near here the semblance of another empire; but it is small
and puny compared to that of the Khmer, not likely to rival it in
duration any more than it has in lasting monuments. When these
pale-faced conquerers shall have gone their way also, they will merely
have cleaned up a little the works of a greater race, and will be
remembered only as the charwomen may be in the ruins of our sky-scrapers
of to-day, by a charred broom or a broken dust-pan left here and there
among the débris.
All afternoon I climbed and loafed about that mighty pile of masonry. In
the immense clearing within which the giant temple sits enthroned,
defended by moats and walls, one had the impression of perfect security,
quite unlike the feeling among the other ruins, for all the nearness and
immensity of the great forest that hangs its black curtain all about it.
Tigers do not cross the great stone bridge, even though the doors are
never closed. The Vat was never finished. When, at the end of our
thirteenth century, the Khmer empire fell, for no good reason that has
ever been discovered, it was still in process of construction. As this
great work of theirs surpasses any of our own, at least when we consider
the tools they had, it is little short of presumptuous to suppose that
we will endure longer than did that doughty empire of the tropical
forests.
The Chinese scholar who visited this mysterious empire on the eve of its
decline and left the only known documents on its splendor tells us that
the fifth tower of Angkor-Vat, rising above all the rest and most
imposing and complicated of all, seeming to give the temple a mountain
summit when seen from afar off, but dwarfed by the very size of the
edifice when one is close beneath it, was crowned with a golden lotus so
large that one could see its sacred flowers gleam in the air from all
parts of the city that is to-day buried in the jungle. Leaning over from
the upper platform at the base of this tower one looks down upon an
entrancing scene below, most of it a hundred feet below. From up there
one sees that what with the tropical sun and rain and long abandonment
each of the superimposed layers of the temple has become a sort of
suspended garden in which the immense leaves of the banana mingle with
white tufts of the fragrant jasmine. The comfortable French bungalow
across the moat is no larger than a dove-cote. Scattered about the
temple clearing are slender palm-trees up which men climb by single
bamboo poles tied with vines to the trunk, carrying over their shoulders
bamboo buckets that they exchange for others hanging from cut fronds
until they are filled with a sap from which is made a brown sugar. Even
the almost naked men among the giant leaves of these trees that looked
so high from below were far beneath me here. In the forest that
surrounds the temple hundreds of parrakeets shrieked; one might think
they had come from the four corners of the forest to enliven the
solitude of the little stone dancers, who in their turn give the ruins
life, and they never leave off chattering until night settles down upon
them, as no doubt the dancers themselves chattered when the forest was a
park and the ruins a palace.
Under the trees at the edges of the clearing are the shacks of monks
where Admiral Viaud, alias Pierre Loti, slept, almost twenty-five years
ago now, when he came to Angkor in his two-wheeled cart and went away on
an elephant. The frail little houses, to which tiny stairs that are
barely ladders lead, are made of wood and mats; some have little
festooned windows from which shaven skulls peer now and then, and they
stand on poles, well above the ground. All the inhabitants are dressed
alike, in bright yellow robes set off by a drapery of orange and other
colors that stand out against the old walls, gray with age, sometimes
reddish, especially near sunset, as it was now, startling flashes of
color against the dense curtain of greenery beneath the clear sky. Too
accustomed to Europeans to be curious toward them, they seem to take us
as unavoidable nuisances, and when they sing in a low voice and
monotonous rhythm they gaze at us without interrupting their tranquil
litany. Now some of them are walking abroad, languidly and without
haste, their hairless heads shining beneath the low sun. Theirs are
curious villages, where there are no women, no animals except mongrel
curs, no tillers of the soil, nothing but these monotonous singers,
yellow of face and dressed in two brighter tones of the same color. For
furniture their simple dwellings have nothing but an old Buddhist altar,
with gods in faded gold, before which little heaps of ashes testify to
the constant burning of joss-sticks to their tawdry divinities. About
two hundred of these bonzes of Cambodia and Siam guard the sacred ruins,
and nearly that number live here perpetually, psalming day and night
about this pile of titanic blocks of stone heaped up by their more hardy
ancestors, or by those whom their more hardy ancestors defeated and
drove away.
Sunset, quickly followed by a bright full moon, came, and the lighting
of the immense stage-setting about me diminished until the forest,
already full of shadows under an ashen sky, in which a yellow
phosphorescence mingled with an ever darker green, died down to a great
spread of vacancy without details or distinctness. In the last light of
the day, leaning over the edge of the uppermost platform, I had seen a
procession of multicolored women drawing away along the great causeway
across the moat, a saffron-clad priest with a rolled parasol across his
back leading them. Cruder Buddhas have here and there replaced broken or
fallen Brahman figures in the great temple, especially within the base
of the central tower in the lofty third story. They are ugly things of
mud and wood compared with the ancient Khmer deities, and to look upon
them gives one the feeling one sometimes has toward the crude
missionaries from our own land who are trying to replace the more
fitting as well as older beliefs of the East with their own. A quantity
of Buddhist idols of all sizes sit on thrones in this upper story,
smiling at nothing, and pilgrims go about, bowing down before statue
after statue, indifferent, and no doubt unaware, whether they are
praying to Vishnu or to Buddha. Sometimes pilgrims from far-off Burma
come in the silence of the night to lay a flower or burn a joss-stick
before each of these figures, with a musty smell now, that are crumbling
away into the dust from which they, like the rest of us, came. A word
from the leader, which one can guess to be some such warning as, “Let us
hurry or the hour of the tiger will overtake us,” and they make their
devotions more hastily, cut even shorter their reverences, and soon
their barefoot tread is lost in the drone of a Buddhist service below as
they descend the steep stone stairways.
Whatever else one may see at Angkor, one always comes back to the great
temple, and that not merely because it is so near the _sala_. I found
myself almost unconsciously wandering there in the moonlight every
evening after dinner. For one thing it gave a respite from the prattle
of tourists, very few of whom ventured into the structure after dark. On
the first day I had met two childlike monks in their yellow robes going
along the gallery with a broom and a scoop of woven bamboo strips. They
were picking up the wherewithal to fertilize some little monastic
garden, no doubt for the growing of flowers, since the pious laymen
furnish them their food, and the tilling of the soil for useful purposes
is not one of the duties of their calling. There is no lack of
fertilizer to be had in Angkor-Vat. The pavements that are not open to
the sun are everywhere carpeted with the droppings of bats, so thick in
many places that one seems to be walking on felt. An almost intolerable
odor permeates all the interior, and the squeaking of what the French so
fittingly call “bald mice” up under the sharp vaults of the crude
massive roofs is always in the ears even of the visitor by day. Then, if
one’s eyes are sharp, they may make out myriads of the repulsive
creatures hanging head down by their claws to the rough stone ceiling,
looking during these their sleeping hours like sacks of dark velvet.
By night, clouds, avalanches of these flying rats, aggressive and
tireless, greet the intruder. As my steps resounded in the obscure
corridors, along which I advanced feeling my way foot by foot, for all
the brilliant moonlight outside, sharp little cries multiplied to a
concert, as of thousands of angry rats above my head. The horrible odor
seemed to increase as one after another of the sleeping creatures
unfolded its hairless membranes and joined in the general movement. It
is always half-night up there under the vaults and roofs, and perhaps
they do not sleep too soundly, or know the hour exactly, even by day;
with the night the least intrusion turns chamber after chamber into
swirls of the squeaking creatures. They descended to touch my hair; the
wind of their wings was like the breeze of electric fans running riot in
the darkness, cold in the tepid night as the breath of death. They
swirled about me in swarms on their silent wings, uttering their angry
little cries, as if banding together to repel an invader. One might have
fancied them the unappeased spirits of the Khmer gods of long ago, or
the unsaved souls of those who built the mountain-temple, resenting the
profaning of the sacred edifice in the solemn hours of the night by the
crude, heavily shod being of the modern world. If I stood perfectly
still for some time, the chorus decreased, died down, disappeared, as if
they had all gone back to sleep again. But with the first step forward
they detached themselves once more, one after another, and soon the same
noisome gyrations of unseen squeaking things was all about me again. My
flesh crept at the damp contact of their wings, at the very thought of
their touching me, and for once I was almost afraid of the dark, a
feeling I had not known since early childhood. I kept myself with
difficulty from fleeing headlong out into the moonlight.
No longer paled by the excess of sun, the bas-relief of the gallery, the
figures on the terraces, the dancing Apsarases everywhere took on a
nebulous clarity that in a way made them all the more beautiful. The
moon shone in silver streams through the carved stone bars of the narrow
windows; out in the courtyards the massive block of Angkor-Vat with its
five towers seemed more gigantic than ever, too enormous to be merely
the work of pygmy mankind. The more than steep stairways had about them
something so uncanny that it took more exertion of the will than of the
thighs to climb them; I had the feeling of entering a mammoth
burial-vault from which there would never again be any escape. As if
fearful of having to accuse myself of cowardice I climbed the first
story, doubly high to the second, forced myself up to the third. A light
like a fallen star twinkled at the top of the highest stairway, at the
door of the sanctuary beneath the central tower. It was the votive-lamp
of the Chettys, the Hindu money-lenders of Cholon and Saïgon, who offer
this eternal flame to the abandoned gods. Then suddenly the squeak of
swirling bats became more than my nerves could bear, and I retreated,
slowly only because of the indignity of frankly running away, and the
likelihood of tobogganing down those long cascades of narrow slippery
steps at a false movement made in haste.
On Monday I set off on foot to Bayon at the crack of dawn, knowing how
painful walking becomes soon after the sun rises above the tree-tops.
The Elephant Terrace and Bayon, with some of the striking old ruins in
their vicinity, about which I spent the morning, I had already hastily
seen as we were Fording bungalow-ward on the first morning in order not
to delay Mrs. Piffton-Smith’s luncheon and nap. Now, alone and at
leisure, I found them second only to Angkor-Vat. Bayon, impressive as a
cathedral, is the oldest sanctuary of Angkor-Thom, two centuries older
than the great temple in which the genius of the Khmer terminated. In
its day it had half a hundred towers, each and every one of them bearing
on all its four sides the face of Brahma, the highest rising nearly
fifty meters above the plain. Now many have fallen, been destroyed, or
been removed by the French to save the others; and still there are so
many of them that one feels the futility of trying to get out of sight
of their myriad-faced god. Those enigmatical faces of Brahma, or Siva,
some of them two men in height, crowned by diadems in stone, gaze so
multitudinously down from even what remains of the pyramidal mass that
one has a feeling of self-consciousness as when one is the focus of the
eyes of a living multitude. Those visages with the enigmatical smile,
the half-closed eyelids, the great flat noses, all with the selfsame
expression of ironic pity, are not merely on every face of every tower;
they gaze even from worn stones, no larger than a fist, picked up in the
underbrush.
Toward the end of the ninth century, four hundred years before the
decline of the Khmer, Bayon, ruder and even more enormous than
Angkor-Vat, was in its glory. The fifty towers of different sizes formed
several stories, and the topmost could be seen from any part of the now
abandoned city. To-day most of it has to be reconstructed by the
imagination, including the vast cleared space that made it possible to
see the crushing stature of the ensemble. In fancy one can rebuild the
successive terraces, the great stairways, the sumptuous avenues which
led to it, bordered by so many columns, balustrades, divinities,
rampant-headed cobras, and monsters, now crumbled away in the grass. But
even the faces of Brahma that remain gazing to the four cardinal points
of the compass seem to affirm, to force upon the beholder, the
omnipresence of the god of Angkor.
A shower-bath, lunch, and a nap, and I was off again, for a three-hour
elephant ride. There are two of these great beasts attached to the
_sala_, but like the goat-cart at the zoo they are now rather
curiosities than useful means of transportation. Akin to all holders of
sinecures, they stood before the door lazily swinging their trunks and
watching with cunning little eyes the Fords that have taken nearly all
their work away from them. The American ladies mounted one of them, Mr.
Piffton-Smith and I the other. The mother of Lady So-and-so would not
risk her precious life in such an adventure, and how her husband
persuaded her to let him undergo this terrifying experience is a
domestic secret to which I have no key.
I shall forevermore think of the elephant as a synonym for caution, for
slowness and docility too, for that matter. The _cornacs_, as the French
call what we know as mahouts, drove these pacific monsters more easily
than we do a horse, nay, as easily as one can drive an automobile,
except that nothing would induce them to move faster than two miles an
hour. Like domesticated man, there was nothing whatever wild about them,
and with every step up the only hillock in all the region the prudent
beasts felt every stone before trusting their weight to it, until they
seemed to personify the precautious mother of a Lady whom we had left
behind. Little by little we dominated the immense sea of absolutely flat
forest. Here where once there were innumerable palaces gleaming in the
sunshine, little more was visible above the endless spread of vegetation
than the block of Bayon and the five towers of Angkor-Vat. The view
across the vast forest-jungle left even that great temple like a needle
lost in a haystack, so tiny was it in its immense setting in the midst
of what looked like an endless and a trackless wilderness.
So terrifying was this experience of rising a hundred feet or two above
sea-level on these cautious monsters that poor Mr. P.-S. had to be
helped down at the summit like an infant, and only the impossibility of
covering on foot the mile or two back to the _sala_ induced him to mount
again. Cambodian workmen, under orders of the French, still toil in
several of the ruins, and here they laughed and shouted as they threw
blocks of stone down the slope with insulting words. Then we went
slowly, more than slowly, back, and across the mammoth bridge over the
moat for a circuit of Angkor-Vat. It was as if, knowing they could not
compete in speed with the Fords that have replaced their fellows, the
beasts had no intention of trying; or it may be that there is an
elephant union. That would even better account for their skill in
wasting time at every movement, at every moment, making their journey
the shortest possible within the three hours allotted us. The foundation
of Angkor-Vat and the bridge leading to it are raised two or three
meters above the ground, to facilitate mounting and dismounting from the
elephants that were once the only beasts of burden in this region. But
there was no time to dismount and mount now; the hour of the tiger would
indeed have come before the lethargic animals took up their funereal
march again. As we crept slowly round the temple, the elephants tore
large branches from some of the tropical trees high above our heads, and
munched them as languidly as a plumber eating his lunch on some one
else’s time. Men in breech-clouts were still walking up the frail
palm-trees with bamboo buckets in which to gather their sugary sap; the
bonzes were chanting their monotonous litanies from their stilt-legged
huts; and then the sun disappeared swiftly in the sea of jungle and gave
us that brief fleeting twilight of the tropics.
On Tuesday morning I mounted a tiny horse and rode away alone through
the woods, the delightful freshness of an early tropical morning all
about me. A light two-wheeled cart was also to be had, but I preferred
the miniature sample of the equine world—until the blazing of the sun
began in earnest. Though there are on the whole few feathered creatures
in the forest that has swallowed up Angkor-Thom, as if even they were
afraid of the denseness of the jungle, the singing of birds and insects
made a mild ceaseless music. Sometimes it sounded as if a bird was
whispering a cordial invitation to me from the bush—or was it merely
whistling to keep up its courage? There was such a wall of verdure on
either side that, like will-o’-the-wisps, they were never really
visible. Monkeys dashed from branch to branch, scores of monkeys, though
not one had we seen during the official trips by Ford. Evidently they
keep out of the way of tourists, perhaps because they cannot endure
their inane chatter. But now they played by the dozen about the ruins,
as freely as if they recognized in me a close relative, and indulged in
a pantomime, worthy of any stage, that was plainly an imitation of the
workmen among the remains of Angkor-Thom. A Cambodian legend assures us
that monkeys formerly talked like men, until the men made slaves of them
and forced them to work. The monkeys did not like this, and as they are
timid but intelligent they simply ceased to talk like us and pretended
not to understand, so that from that time forth they have lived in
peace, gathering nothing except for their dinners, and gamboling among
the trees to their hearts’ content. The thin Cambodian coolies who toil
for the French about the ruins have not been so clever.