Chapter II: 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.