Chapter III: 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.