Full text of "Siam"
m
SIAM
UNIFORM WITH THIS VOLUME.
EGYPT. By PIERRE LOTI. Translated by
W. P. Baines, and with Plates in full colour
from paintings by Augustus O. Lamplough.
Demy 8vo. 7s. 6d. net.
A wonderfully fascinating book, conveying vivid
pictures of the charm of Egypt and the marvels of its
antiquity. Loti, as is his wont, endeavours to get at
the heart of what he sees, as he steeps himself in the
enchantment of moonlit temples erected by the most
ancient of civilisations, watches the sun set behind
the illimitable wastes of the desert, glides over the
darkening waters of the half-submerged island of
Philae, " Pearl of Egypt," or listens to the mournful
song of the boatman as he drifts on his dahabieh
down the Nile ; and gradually a comprehension grows
upon him of the reasons that made Egypt the first
country to awaken from the torpor of barbarism and
to build monuments which are the wonder and
admiration of the whole of the modern world. He
realises the greatness and feels to the full her spell.
INDIA. By PIERRE LOTI. A third and
revised and cheaper edition entirely reset
and now first illustrated with eighteen
plates in colour and half-tone by A. Hugh
Fisher. Demy 8vo. 7s. 6d. net.
Loti's idea in going to India was to discover if in
the Buddhist faith he could find anything to replace
the Catholic religion in which he could no longer
believe. He visits the ruined temples of the ancient
Oods, festooned with jungle flowers ; he rises in the
early mournful dawn, and penetrates where European
feet have seldom trod ; he listens to the languorous
Oriental music on moonlit nights ; he experiences
nameless dreads, indescribable terrors. He visits
the sacred city of Benares, and watches the wrapt
worshippers on the banks and the smoke ascending
from the funeral pyre of an exquisitely beautiful
Indian girl. He sees the little children, living
skeletons from famine, piteously begging for bread,
and finally he visits the high priests of Theosophy
who have sought refuge in India away from th
tumult of life, and finds what his soul craves for.
Mr Hugh Fisher has caught admirably the spirit
of the East, and his sketches and paintings give a
great additional charm to the text.
SIAM
BY
PIERRE LOTI
TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH BY
W. P. BAINES
ILLUSTRATED
LONDON
T. WERNER LAURIE, LTD.
CLIFFORD'S INN
630271
3)5
AUTHOR'S DEDICATION
To Monsieur Paul Doumer
DEAR FRIEND, It was during your Governor-
ship made notable by your so admirable talents
that last I visited Cambodia. And I owe it
to your charming courtesy that I was able in a
few short days to penetrate as far as Angkor.
May I ask, then, that you will accept the
dedication of this little narrative, as a token
of my affectionate remembrance, and also of
my esteem ?
And will you forgive me for having said that
our Empire in Indo-China would lack grandeur
and, more especially, would lack stability you
who have worked so gloriously and so patiently
to ensure its permanence ? But so it is. I do
not believe in the future of our distant colonial
conquests. And I mourn the thousands and
vii
Author's Dedication
thousands of our brave little soldiers, who,
before your arrival, were buried in those Asiatic
cemeteries, when we might so well have spared
their precious lives, and risked them only in the
last defence of our beloved French land.
PIERRE LOTI.
VJ1J
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I 3
II ii
III ,9
IV 25
V. . 29
VI. . . 39
VII. . ... 49
VIII. . . 83
IX 115
X. . . 133
XI 141
XII. . . 153
XIII. . 167
IX
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
THE GREAT STAIRCASE, ANGKOR-VAT (BY EDITH
M. HINCHLEY) Frontispiece
ANGKOR- VAT To face page 6
COCOANUT PALMS 2O
THE BEGINNING OF THE RAINS ... 42
HABITATIONS OF THE MONKS, ANGKOR-VAT . 58
THE GATE OF VICTORY, ANGKOR-THOM . ,,64
THE CAUSEWAY, ANGKOR-VAT .... 72
FROM THE GALLERY OF BAS-RELIEFS . ,,74
CARVINGS FROM ANGKOR-VAT .... 84
A WINDOW, ANGKOR-VAT 92
AN ANGLE OF A COURT, ANGKOR-VAT . 96
A DOOR-POST, ANGKOR-VAT .... IO2
THE CENTRAL TOWER, ANGKOR-VAT . . 106
A TOWER, ANGKOR-VAT 108
A COLONNADE, ANGKOR-VAT .... no
BAYON 118
A DOORWAY, BAYON 122
AN APSARA 126
DANCING GIRLS 156
CHAPTER 1
SIAM
CHAPTER I
I DO not know if it is a common lot to have
from childhood, as I have had, foreboding of
one's whole life. Nothing has happened to me
that I have not dimly foreseen from my earliest
years.
The ruins of Angkor ! I remember so well
a certain evening of April, a little overcast, on
which as in a vision they appeared to me.
It was in my " museum " a little room
allotted to my childish studies at the top of
my parents' house where I had gathered
together a collection of shells, rare-plumaged
birds, barbaric arms and ornaments, a multitude
of things that spoke to me of distant countries.
For at this time it had been quite decided by
my parents that I should remain at home and
not venture forth into foreign lands as did
Siam
my elder brother who not long before had died
in the far east of Asia.
This evening then, an idle scholar as was
my habit, I had shut myself in amongst these
disturbing things, for reverie rather than with
the idea of completing my tasks ; and I was
turning over some old and yellowed papers
that had come back from Indo- China with the
belongings of my dead brother. A few diaries.
Two or three Chinese books. And then a
number of I know not what colonial review
in which was recounted the discovery of colossal
ruins hidden in the depths of the forests of
Siam.
There was one picture at which I stopped
with a kind of thrill of great strange towers
entwined with exotic branches, the temples of
mysterious Angkor ! Not for one moment did
I doubt but that one day I should see them
in reality, through all and notwithstanding all,
in spite of prohibitions, in spite of impossibilities.
To think of it better I moved to the window
of my museum and gazed, chin in hand, at the
outstretched country. Of all the windows in
the house this one of mine commanded the most
distant prospect. In the foreground were the
old roofs of the tranquil neighbourhood ; beyond,
Siam
the hundred-year-old trees of the ramparts, and
then, and at last, the river by which the ships
made their way to the ocean.
And very distinctly at this time there came to
me a foreknowledge of a life of travels and adven-
tures, with hours magnificent, even a little fabu-
lous as for some oriental prince ; and hours, too,
infinitely miserable. In this future of mystery,
greatly magnified by my childish imagination, I
saw myself becoming a kind of legendary hero,
an idol with feet of clay, fascinating thousands
of my fellow-creatures, worshipped by many,
and by some suspected and shunned.
In order that my personality might be more
romantic there needed some shadow in the
renown I was imagining for myself. What
could that shadow well be ? Something fantastic
something fearsome ? Perhaps a pirate. Yes ;
it would not greatly have displeased me to be
suspected of piracy on seas far distant and
scarcely known.
And then there appeared to me my own
decline, and, much later, my return to the scenes
of my childhood, with heart aweary and whitening
hair. My parental home, piously conserved,
would have remained unaltered; but here and
there, pierced in the walls, hidden doors would
5
Siam
lead to a palace of the Arabian nights, filled
with the precious stones of Golconda, with all
my fantastic booty. And then, for the Bible
was at that time my daily reading, I heard
murmuring in my brain the verses of Ecclesiastes
on the vanity of things.
Tired of the sights of the world and entering
again, an old man, the same little museum of
my childhood, I was repeating to myself: "I
have tried all things ; I have been everywhere ;
I have seen everything. ..." And amongst
the many phrases already ringing sadly that
came to lull me at my window was one that,
I know not why, will remain for ever impressed
upon my memory. It was this : "In the depths
of the forests of Siam I have seen the star of
evening rise over the ruins of Angkor."
A whistle, at once commanding and soft,
caused me suddenly to become again the little
submissive child that in reality I had not ceased
to be. It came from below, from the courtyard
with its old walls garlanded with plants. I
would have known it amongst a thousand ; it was
the usual summons of my father when I was
discovered in some small transgression. And
I replied, " I am up here, in my museum. Do
you want me ? Shall I come down ? "
6
Siam
He should have come into my study and
cast his eye over my unfinished lessons.
" Yes, come down at once, little man, and
finish your Greek composition, if you want to
be free after dinner to go to the circus."
(I used to love the circus ; but I was toiling
that year under the ferule of a hated professor
whom we called the Great Black Monkey, and
my over-long tasks were never done.)
Still, I descended to set myself to the com-
position. The courtyard, that yet was pleasant
enough with its old low walls overgrown with
roses and jasmine, struck me as narrow, as too
enclosed, and the April twilight falling at this
hour seemed unwontedly cloudy, even some-
how sinister ; in my mind I had a vision of blue
skies, wide spaces, the open sea and the forests
of Siam, out of which rose from amongst the
palms the towers of prodigious Angkor.
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER II
Saturday, 23rd November 1901.
IT is some five-and-thirty years later. A warm,
heavy, torrential rain is pouring from leaden-
coloured clouds, deluging the trees and streets
of a colonial town that smells of musk and
opium. Half- naked Annamites and Chinese
hasten along, by the side of our homebred
soldiers whose faces are pale beneath their cork
helmets. A noxious moist heat afflicts the
lungs ; the air might be the vapour of some
cauldron in which perfumes were mingled with
the odours of putrefaction.
And this is Saigon a town I could have
wished that I might never see, of which the
very name once seemed to me mournful. For
it was hither that my brother (my senior by
fifteen years) had come, like so many others of
his generation, to take the germs of death.
To-day this Saigon of exile and languor is a
familiar place enough. After an acquaintance
11
Siam
of many years I have come now to think that
I no longer hate it. When I came to it for
the first time already a little past the prime of
life how sadly strange and unfriendly I found
its welcome. But 1 have grown used to its
leaden skies, to the exuberance of its unhealthy
verdure, to the Chinese quaintness of its flowers,
to its loneliness in the midst of grassy plains
sown with tombs, to the little cat's eyes of its
yellow women, to all that constitutes its morbid
and perverse attraction. Besides, I have already
memories here, a semblance of a past ; almost I
have loved here ; here, too, I have had my share
of suffering. And to the immense cemetery,
overgrown with rank herbage, I have led many
of my comrades-in-arms.
On the occasions of my previous visits we
were in a state of continual alarms, in connection
with warlike expeditions into Annam and Tonkin
and China ; and it had not been possible to find
time to make the deep plunge into the interior
of the country, towards the ruins of Angkor.
But at last, for once, I find myself at Saigon
and at leisure. Our period of active service had
terminated in the gulf of Pekin, and the grim
warship to which I am attached is anchored here
certainly for more than a month, alongside the
12
Siam
homesick quay, near to that dismal and, as it
might seem, abandoned dockyard, where the
earth is red as bloodstone beneath foliage that
is too magnificently green.
And this evening, after so many years of
waiting, I set out at length on my visit to the
great ruins. The rain pours down on Saigon in
the customary deluge. Everything is streaming
with the tepid water. The carriage which takes
me to the railway (even in so commonplace
a fashion does my journey begin) throws up
waves of reddish -coloured mud on to the naked
bodies and the white linen clothes of passers-by.
Around the station is a quarter that might be
in China itself, instead of in a French colony.
The train starts; the carriages are stifling in
spite of the visit of the storm. In the twilight,
which gathers apace under the heavy clouds,
we have to traverse melancholy stretches of
grass-land which are studded with a multitude
of old Chinese mausoleums of the colour of rust ;
the whole extent of the "Plain of Tombs,"
where already things lose their colour and
become grey ; and, were it not for the persistent
heat, this November evening on this foreign
steppe would be like one of our more misty
evenings at home. And then the night
13
Siam
overtakes us in the endless succession of the
ricefields.
At the end of a two hours' journey the train
stops. We are at Mytho, which is the terminus
of the line, the end of this unpretentious little
colonial railway. Here the scene changes, as
happens commonly in this region. The clouds
have melted from the sky, and the nocturnal
blue stretches limpid, wonderful, with its sowing
of stars. We are in the neighbourhood of a
large, tranquil river, the Mekong ; hard by here
a steamboat should be waiting to take me, first
of all, to Cambodia, by way of the river. The
road which leads me to the spot, along the
bank of the river, is like the avenue of some
trim park, only the trees that overhang it with
their branches are larger than ours, and fireflies
everywhere flicker their nimble, dancing fires.
Peace and silence. The place would be perfect
were it not for the eternal heaviness of the air
and the enervating perfumes. A number of
lights in row amongst the greenness indicate
the streets, or rather the alleys, of the humble
provincial town, which was laid out in a single
planning on the level plain. And how can one
describe the sadness, the brooding pensiveness,
in the night-time, of these corners of France, of
14
Siam
these outposts of the fatherland astray in the
thick bushland of Asia, isolated from everything,
even from the sea ? . . . Little groups of soldiers in
white linen uniforms are taking their monotonous
evening stroll along the road I am following,
and, as they pass, I can detect in their voices
now the accent of Gascony, now the accent of
my own native province. Poor fellows ! the
mothers that bore them are waiting anxiously at
far distant firesides; while they, perforce, must
squander here a year or two of the most precious
of life. Perhaps they will leave behind them
little half-bred tokens of their being, who little
by little may infiltrate the French blood into this
stubborn yellow people; then they will return
home, with blood for long impoverished by the
sojourn in this climate ; or, perhaps, they will
not return, but lay their bones, like so many
thousand others, in the red earth of the
neighbouring cemeteries which are disquieting
in that they are so vast, and so overgrown with
rank weeds.
The steam-boat gets under way as soon as
I am on board ; we begin to ascend the Mekong,
keeping near to the banks, where the trees
seem to stretch out a curtain intensely black,
and the fireflies continue their sparkling
15
Siam
dances. Before we reach the border of the
forests of Siam, we shall have to traverse the
whole of Cambodia ; but I purpose stopping
at Pnom-Penh, the capital of the good king
Norodom, where I shall arrive by to-morrow
night.
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER III
i
Sunday, 24th November 1901.
MY little steam-boat has been making way
all night against the current of the majestic
river, journeying towards the north. Daybreak
finds us continuing the same peaceful naviga-
tion through this Indo - Chinese bush, the end-
less curtains of which were so black under the
stars, but are become glorious now in the sun-
light. Banana - palms, cocoanut - palms, man-
groves, bamboos, rushes, packed close together
in a serried and endless mass. At first sight one
might think the country was uninhabited ; but
looking more closely one sees clearly enough
how cunningly its opulent green mantle has been
penetrated underneath by the human microbe.
Here and there tracks, such as might be made
by the beasts of the forest, debouch from
beneath the trees and lead to the river. They
are the first indication of the villages. As we
pass them at close quarters, the perfumes of
19
Siam
the flowers become mingled with offensive
animal odours ; a few poor huts are disclosed,
cowering among the branches, and human
beings appear, lowly and, as it were, negligible,
under the sovereign eternal verdure. Lean
Annamites with bodies of the colour of saffron.
Young women often pleasing in body and
countenance, but repulsive as soon as they
smile and show their teeth lacquered in black,
which make the mouth look like a gloomy
cave. A diminutive humanity, at once in-
fantine and old, which has scarcely evolved
since the time of the prehistoric ancestor, and
has been hidden for centuries in the foliage of
this tropical flora.
There are a number of native canoes on the
river, fashioned each one of them out of a
hollowed tree -trunk; and everywhere along
the banks primitive kinds of fishing-tackle
wattle-like things made of reeds or bamboo.
For the most part they resemble huge cocoons,
which, as they emerge from the green confusion,
plunge at once half-way into the water. You
might almost imagine that they were the
chrysalides out of which these little yellow
people were born : a sort of worm or maggot,
whose business it was here to gnaw the wonder-
20
Siam
ful covering of the plains. And over and above
the so many outspread snares are the innumerable
bird-fishers, long-legged, long-necked, with long,
cruel beaks always ready for their prey. Men
and wading birds alike waylay the myriads
of silent, rudimentary lives which pass within
the river. From all antiquity their flesh has
been nourished on the colder flesh of fish.
More than once my pilot loses his way in
the winding of these banks, so endlessly alike,
and strays into deceptive little tributaries,
bordered always with the same curtains of
verdure. And we get stranded there and have
to make our way back.
As evening approaches the human type
changes. The few inhabitants of the banks,
of whom we get glimpses through the reeds,
are more Hindoo, more Aryan in type ; their
eyes are large and straight, and the eyebrows
well marked ; moustaches shadow the lips of the
men. The habitations also are different, higher
and raised on piles. We are no longer in
Cochin-China. We have entered Cambodia.
And an hour after midnight we moor our
boat to a quay before the town of Pnom-Penh,
which is asleep under the stars.
21
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER IV
Monday, 25th November 1901.
THE air here is already less oppressive than at
Saigon, less charged with electricity and moisture.
One feels more alive.
And a melancholy of a different kind emanates
from this town, lost as it is in the interior of a
land -bound country, without ships, without
sailors, without animation of any sort. It is
comparatively but a few years since King
Norodom confided his country to France, and
already everything that we have built at Pnom-
Penh has taken on an air of old age under the
scorching of the sun. The fine straight roads
we traced here, along which no one passes, are
green with weeds. It might be one of those
ancient colonies, the charm of which lies in
desuetude and silence.
To-day, nevertheless, is the third day of the
traditional water festival, and in the evening, as
the sun turns to a coppery red, the banks of the
25
Siam
river suddenly become animated. In one of the
royal junks, the prow of which represents the
enormous head of some monster of Cambodian
dream, I watch, in company with a score or so
French men and women living in exile here at
Pnom-Penh, the progress of the long racing
canoes. They go past in a furious eddy of
spray, manipulated by half -nude men, who
paddle standing, with movements of dexterous
grace, shouting, at the same time, encouraging
cries.
26
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER V
Tuesday, 26th November 1901.
STANDING back from the bank of the river
stretch the vast quarters of the King, invested
in silence. With their denuded courts they
form, as it were, a kind of glade in the midst of
this country, by the side of this town so over-
grown with trees, and the roads of reddish
earth which surround them are pitted with
large imprints from the daily promenade of the
elephants.
This morning at half past six o'clock, wander-
ing alone in the early sunshine, I enter the gate
of one of the courtyards of the palace a court-
yard of considerable extent, paved in white. In
the middle, isolated in the bare emptiness, is a
slim pagoda of white and gold, the roof of
which bristles with golden spikes, and isolated
also at either side of this little solitude two
high bell- turrets of gold, extraordinarily pointed,
which are supported on a kind of rock-work,
decked with orchids and a diversity of rare
29
Siam
blooms. I perceive no sign of living thing.
But the silence here is of a peculiar kind; a
sound as of rustling mingles with it in an
undertone without disturbing it a vague, aerial
music which at first escapes definition; it is
the concert of the little silver bells suspended
at each point of the bell-turrets and of the
roofs ; the least breath of air that passes makes
them tinkle softly.
The pagoda, which is quite new, is re-
splendent in the whiteness of its marble and
its glistening golds. Its windows are decorated
with copings of gold, which, against the white
background of the wall, stand out like pieces
of fine jewellery. Its roofs, covered with gilded
ceramics, are ornamented at each corner with
horns of extraordinary length, which curve and
recover, menacing in all directions. Compared
with these the horns of the Chinese pagodas
seem verily only rudimentary things, little better
than shoots ; many giant bulls, one is tempted to
say, have been uncoifed to decorate this strange
temple. The different peoples of the yellow
race have been haunted for centuries by this
conception of horned roofings for their religious
edifices, but it has been left to the Cambodians
to surpass them all in extravagance.
30
Siam
Steps are approaching, heavy steps, and three
elephants appear. Paying no heed to me they
cross the courtyard with an intelligent, business-
like air, as of people who know what they have
to do. The sound of their march and of the
bells hung at their collars breaks for a moment
into the seolian concert which falls discreetly
from above, and then, as soon as they have
gone, the musical silence returns a silence
which is exquisite here in the purity and com-
parative freshness of the morning.
The open doors of the pagoda invite me to
enter.
On its ceiling, on its walls, golds of extra-
ordinary brilliance glisten everywhere, and
my footsteps resound on flags of bright new
silver with which the pagoda is paved through-
out. There are still countries then, where,
even in our times, men think to build such
sanctuaries !
Almost immediately, through a different door,
there enter four small creatures, all of them
young, all of them slender, with hair cut short
like boys, and a gardenia bloom fastened over
the ear. The beautiful silks which cover them,
outlining their scarcely-formed breasts, indicate
them to be women of the palace dancing girls
31
Siam
beyond a doubt, for there is scarcely any
other womankind at the court of old King
Norodom. To the movement which I make to
withdraw they reply by a charming, timid sign,
as if to say : " Pray, stay where you are ; you are
not disturbing us." And I thank them with
a bow. This human courtesy which we have
learnt at opposite ends of the earth, and of
which just now we have made distantly, as it
were, the exchange, is, perhaps, the only notion
we have in common. In the course of my life
I had met with many women of this type,
women who, in their relation to life, are little
better than dolls or toys, but never before had
I come across the little Cambodian at home;
and 1 watch with interest these four as, with
silent step and easy, unaffected grace, they move
about over the silver floor. From early child-
hood their bodies, their every limb, have been
made supple by those long, ritual dances, which
are the custom here on feast days and days of
funeral. What is it brings them so early to
the temple ? What childish scruple ? And
what can be the nature of the prayers formu-
lated by their little souls, that are revealed now,
anxious, in their eyes ?
The heat is already oppressive as I return
32
Siam
to the quarters occupied by the French, to look
for shade on board my little steamboat moored
against the bank. Prostration and silence in the
streets, so straightly made but so empty, where
the weeds encroach upon the footpaths. Save
for some naked Cambodian slaves, who, careless
and happy, are watering the lawns of the
strangely -flowered gardens, I meet nobody.
The capital of King Norodom has gone to
sleep till the close of the day, under the dazzling
brilliance of the sun. And clearly one gets the
impression that this little corner of France,
which has been grafted here, will not endure,
will not " make good," such an air of antiquity
and abandonment has it taken on after a few
short years.
At three o'clock in the afternoon I make
ready to continue my journey towards the ruins
of Angkor, against the current of the Mekong.
Pnom-Penh disappears at once ; and the pro-
digious Asiatic bush envelops us again within
its profound curtains. At the same time there
is revealed, everywhere around, an animal life
of extraordinary intensity. On the banks,
which we almost brush in passing, whole armies
of bird - fishers are standing on the watch :
pelicans, egrets, and marabouts. Frequently
33 c
Siam
the air is blackened with flights of crows. In
the distance arise little clouds of green-coloured
dust, which as they approach are seen to be
flights of innumerable paroquets. Here and
there the trees are full of monkeys, and you
can see the long tails hanging in lines like a
fringe on all the branches.
From time to time, human habitations in an
isolated group. Always a long shaft of gold
dominates them, pointing into the sky the
pagoda.
My men having asked that they might be
allowed to provision themselves with fruits for
the journey, I call a halt, at the hour of twilight,
at a large village built on piles right on the
bank of the river. Some smiling Cambodians
come forward at once offering fresh cocoa-nuts
and bunches of bananas. And while the
bargaining proceeds, an enormous red moon
rises beyond, over the infinitude of the forests.
Night falls as we resume our journey. Cries
of owls, cries of beasts of prey, an infinite con-
cert of all kinds of musical insects, delirious
with the frenzy of the night-time in the in-
extricable verdure.
And then, later on, the waters expand so
that we no longer see the banks. We are enter-
34
Siam
ing the immense lake formed here every year
by the potent river, which periodically inundates
the low-lying plains of Cambodia and a part of
the forests of Siam. Not a breath of wind.
As if we were floating on oil, we trace, in
gliding over this fever - breeding lake, smooth
folds which the moon silvers. And the warm
air, which we cleave rapidly in our progress,
is encumbered with clouds of giddily - circling
insects, which assemble in a regular vortex at
the sight of our lanterns, and fall upon us
like rain : gnats, mosquitoes, day-flies, beetles,
dragon-flies.
About midnight, when we had retired for the
night, and lay, half-dressed, with the windows
open, we were visited without warning by a
swarm of large, black beetles, covered with
prickles like a chestnut, but otherwise inoffen-
sive, which crawled very rapidly over us, ex-
ploring our chest and arms.
35
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VI
Wednesday, '21th November 1901.
ON the lake, large as a sea, behold the rising
of the sun. And in a few minutes everything
takes on colour. The eastern horizon becomes
suffused with pink, and a line of beautiful
Chinese green indicates the endless continua-
tion of the inundated forest. By way of contrast
on the western horizon where the shore is too
far off to be seen there is a massing of sombre,
chaotic, terrifying things, which seem to weigh
upon the waters things which hold together
and remain in position, as do the heapings of
mountains, and stand out as clearly as real
mountain summits against the clear sky; but
which seem, nevertheless, to be on the point of
toppling in downfalls as formidable as those of
the end of the world. And the whole of this
heaped-up mass is ravined and caverned and
contorted, with deep shadows in its folds, and
lights of reddish copper on its prominences.
39
Siam
And right above it, as if it had been placed
there, the old, dead moon, a large full moon of
the colour of tin, begins to fade before the sun
which rises opposite. All this western horizon
would be a sight from which to avert the eyes,
a sight to strike terror, did one not know what
in fact it is : a storm, of an aspect a hundred
times more terrible than ours, which broods
there as if sleeping, and in all probability will
not break.
It was to this we owed the heat and the kind
of electric tension so enervating in its effect,
which had oppressed us towards the end of the
night. From experience of these climates we
had guessed before seeing it that somewhere
or other in the air there was a monster of the
kind. But as we watch it begins to lose shape,
to become attenuated so that it no longer has
the appearance of consistence, and we breathe
more and more freely in proportion as it all
gradually dissolves. At the moment there are
a few negligible clouds ; presently there remains
nothing but a light vapour which does no more
than cover with a warm mist the western side
of this little sea over which we travel alone.
Not a canoe in sight, no more sign of man
than before his first appearance amongst the
40
Siam
terrestrial fauna. But here and there long trails
of a pinkish-white streak the greenish waters
saturated with organic substances. They are
companies of pelicans, sleeping as they float.
Until the middle of the day, we continue our
progress over this motionless lake, which gleams
like polished tin. On the eastern horizon what
looks to be a kind of green foam stretches
endlessly, and with an endless sameness : tall
trees, the trunks of which are entirely sub-
merged, so that the tops alone rise out of the
water. It is only an illusory shore, for beneath
the verdure the lake continues its extent for
indefinite distances. It is no more than the
boundary of the deeper waters in which the
vegetation has lost its footing.
Thirty leagues, forty leagues of submerged
forest unroll in this way while we continue our
peaceful course towards the north. An immense
zone, useless during this season from the point
of view of man, but a prodigious reservoir of
animal life. Shades full of snares and ambushes,
of ferocious beaks and claws, of little venomous
teeth, of little stings, sharpened for deadly sting-
ings. There are branches that bend beneath
the weight of grave marabouts in repose ; and
trees so laden with pelicans that in the distance
41
Siam
they look to be abloom with large pale-pink
flowers.
When, in the course of our navigation, we
draw close to this forest of eternal green, so as
almost to touch it, the hosts of the branches
become alarmed and take to flight. And then,
at close quarters, we see what can only be
described as skeins of creeping plants wound,
as it were, round the trees, binding them one
to another, so that the forest presents itself
to us as one single inextricable mass.
At about one o'clock, we cast anchor in the
shade of a little bay, enclosed with wanton
verdure. This, it appears, is the place where
the large sampans, ordered in advance from
the chief of the nearest village, on the way
to Angkor, will come to find me. The little
steam-boat which has carried me to this point
would not in any case be able to proceed further
through the forest.
They appear at about six o'clock in the
evening, these roofed sampans, emerging one
after the other from under the medley of
creepers. The large red sun has just set when
I take my place in one, with my French servant,
my Cambodian interpreter, my Chinese boy,
and our light travellers' baggage. And then,
42
i 1 >
Siam
propelled by the native rowers, we begin to
thrust our way into the labyrinth of trees, into
the heart of the submerged forest which closes
over us. At the same time the night comes
to envelop us, almost suddenly, without any
period of twilight.
The region which we are now about to
traverse is transformed into a lake only for
about six months of the year. Soon the
waters will subside, and the earth will re-
appear and proceed hastily to cover itself with
herbage. And men will return to build their
huts for the dry season, leading back their
flocks and followed by the inevitable train of
tigers and monkeys. A pastoral life will resume
its place here until the next rains.
All these large trees, immersed up to the
spreading of the branches, are not distinguish-
able in the darkness from our oaks and
beeches ; and it might be an inundated country
of a climate such as our own, were it not for
this oppressive heat, this excess of perfumes,
this excess of rustling round about, this plethora
of sap and life. The sky is covered anew with
storm-clouds, and the atmosphere again becomes
almost stifling. The night is without stars
and without moon. In this zone where we
43
Siam
are now, there are no silhouettes of palms. The
great black tufts which follow one another in
an endless procession during the course of our
progress are like the tops of our trees at home,
although they are of unknown species. Despite
the night you can see them repeated in the
darkened mirror of the waters, and their reversed
reflections somehow seem to reinforce the
feeling of inundation, of something abnormal,
of cataclysm, that impresses itself upon you.
Continually, as we go along, we hit against the
thick foliage, and lizards that were lying asleep,
day-flies in myriads, little serpents and locusts
descend upon us. Often our rowers lose their
way, call to one another with mournful Asiatic
cries, and change their course. The ruins
which we are going to visit are truly admirably
guarded by such a forest as this.
At the end of some two hours, however, we
succeed in emerging from beneath the trees,
and enter a kind of marsh, amongst reeds and
grasses of extraordinary size. Here we find
a narrow river which we commence to ascend,
brushing against reeds and plants of every sort.
The night grows darker and darker. As we
pass we disturb great birds which take to flight,
or perhaps an otter, or some unknown beast
44
Siam
which we can hear making its escape with light
nimble bounds.
And at last, at about ten o'clock, while our
boatmen continue their rowing without a stop,
we stretch ourselves under our mosquito-nets
and fall at once into a trustful sleep.
45
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VII
Thursday, 28th November 1901.
IT is about two o'clock in the morning. We
are awakened, but deliciously and scarcely, by
a sound of music, slow, soft, never before heard,
and of a wonderful strangeness. It sounds
neither too far off nor too near flutes,
dulcimers, zithers, and, it would seem, too,
peals of little bells and silver gongs rhythming
the melody in an undertone. At the same time
we become conscious that the music of the
oars has ceased and the sampan no longer
moves. Here, then, is the end of our journey
by water, and we are moored, no doubt, against
the bank ready to disembark as soon as the
sun rises. The music continues, monotonous,
repeating over and over again the same phrases,
which yet are not wearisome but soothing.
And we soon fall asleep again, after murmur-
ing to ourselves, in these moments of half-
waking : " Good ! We have reached Siam . . .
49 D
Siam
at some village . . . and there is a nocturnal
festival ... in the pagoda ... in honour of
the local gods. . . . '
Half-past six o'clock in the morning. We
awake again, but for good this time, for it is
day. Between the planks which shelter us we
see filtering rays of pink light. The music has
not ceased. It is there still always soft and
always the same, but mingled now with the
shrill clarion of cocks, and the sounds of the
daily life about to recommence.
It is a positive enchantment to gaze outside.
If the vegetation of the submerged forest, on
which our eyes closed, recalled that of our
climate, here a tropical flora of the utmost ex-
travagance is displayed in all varieties of palms,
of huge green plumes, of huge green fans. We
are before a village, on a little river with flowery
banks. Through the reeds the rising sun shoots
everywhere its golden arrows. Little thatched
houses built upon piles make a line along a
pathway of fine sand. Men and women, half-
nude, slender, with bodies copper-coloured, come
and go amongst the verdure. They pass and
pass again, a little out of curiosity, perhaps ; but
their curiosity is not impertinent, and their
eyes are smiling and kindly. The flowers shed
50
Siam
a surpassing fragrance : an odour of jasmine, of
gardenia, of tuberose. In the clear light of the
broadening day this simple coming and going
of the morning seems like a scene of the early
ages, when tranquillity was still the lot of
man. And, too, used as we had become to
the ugliness of the daughters of Annam, who
see only through cramped eyelids, through
two little oblique slits, what a change it
seems, and what a comfort, to come amongst
a people who open their eyes more or less as
we open our own.
And we put foot to earth in Siam. 1
Beyond, under a hangar with a roof of mats,
the musicians of the night, who for the moment
have ceased to play, are squatting by the side
of their dulcimers, their flutes, and their zithers.
They had given all this concert of theirs in
honour of some humble Buddhist pictures
poor daubs of blue and red and gold, which
are hung there ; before which also are fading
offerings of flowers : lotus, jasmine, and water-
lilies.
And now arrive my ox-carts, ordered
1 The writer knows, of course, that under an arrangement recently
made with Siam the territory of Angkor has been ceded to
Cambodia in other words, to France.
51
Siam
since yesterday from the chief of the district ;
five carts, be it understood, for there is not
room in one for more than a single person,
who sits back to back with the driver. They
resemble a sort of mandoline, mounted on
wheels and drawn by the arm, which is
curved like the prow of a gondola.
We have to hasten our departure in order that
we may arrive at Angkor before the heat of mid-
day. At the outset of our journey we follow
the course of the narrow river along a path-
way of sand, bordered with reeds and flowers.
Above us is a colonnade of tall cocoa-nut-
palms, from which hang garlands of creepers,
decked with clusters of flowers. There is an
exquisite morning freshness under these high
trees. We pass through villages, peaceful
and pleasing as in the golden age, where the
inhabitants watch us go by with smiles of shy
good-will. The presence of an Indian strain
in the blood of these people becomes more and
more pronounced, and many of the women have
large, black eyes, shaded by lashes that might
be the envy of a Bayadere.
At the end of about an hour we stop at
Siem-Reap, almost a town, but quite Siamese
in character, with its little houses raised always
52
Siam
on piles, and its pagoda bristling with golden
horns. It boasts a post office, however, quite
a countryside post office, where one may frank
letters with stamps bearing the likeness of King
Chulalongkorn ; and a little telegraph office
also, for a telegram is brought to me, couched
in this wise :
" Superior Resident at Pnom-Penh to the
Governor of Siem-Reap. Will you please
inform M. Pierre Loti that he will find four
elephants at Kompong-luong on his return."
It is what I was hoping for. I had asked
the good King Norodom if he could place four
elephants at my disposal in order that, when I
had made the pilgrimage to Angkor, I might
visit the pagoda where rest the ashes of the
queen-mother of Cambodia, in the midst of
forest.
On leaving Siem-Reap our ox-carts turn
away from the river and follow another sandy
road which plunges right into the forest. And
then suddenly there is an end to the tall green
palms above our heads ; for all this vegetation
of cocoanut and areca palms is confined to
the banks of the river. We make our way
now under foliage that is similar to that of
53
Siam
our own climate, only the trees that bear it
would be a little giantlike compared with ours.
In spite of so much shade the heat, as the sun
climbs the sky, becomes every minute more
oppressive. Following the ill - defined road
through the high forest trees and impenetrable
bush, our carts jog along in time with the
trotting of the oxen between two banks of
thicket or bracken. And the prudent monkeys
cling to the highest of the branches.
When, at the end of some two hours'
travelling through the forest in this fashion,
we were beginning, what with the jolting and
the rocking and the heat, to feel ourselves
overtaken by somnolence, the fabulous town
itself was suddenly revealed to our eyes.
Before us there is gradually unfolded an
extent of open space; first of all a marsh
overgrown with grasses and water-lilies, then a
wide stretch of water which liberates us at last
from the forest, in the dense covering of which
we had been travelling ; and, further on, beyond
the stagnant waters, a number of towers, in the
form of tiaras, towers of grey -coloured stone,
immense dead towers, outlined against the pale
luminosity of the sky. Yes ! I recognise them
at once. They are indeed the towers of the
54
Siam
old picture which had so troubled me once
upon a time, on an April evening, in my little
museum. I am in the presence of mysterious
Angkor !
And yet somehow I do not feel the emotion that
I should have expected. I come to them too
late in life, perhaps ; or perhaps I have seen too
many of these remains of the great past, too
many temples, too many palaces, too many
ruins. Besides it is all so blurred, as it were,
under the glare of the sun ; one sees it ill by
reason of the very excess of light in the sky.
And, above all, midday is drawing near with its
lassitude, its invincible somnolence.
The colossal ramparts and the towers that
have just appeared to us, like some mirage
of the torrid heat, are not the town itself,
but only Angkor - Vat, its principal temple.
The town, Angkor-Thorn, so we are advised,
lies further away, immense and indeterminate,
buried under the tropical forest.
Leading to this phantom basilica is a bridge
of remote ages, built of cyclopean blocks, which
crosses a pool or moat, choked with reeds and
water-lilies. Two monsters, corroded by time
and bearded with lichen, guard the entrance
to it. It is paved with long flagstones, which
55
Siam
sink and slope, and in places seem almost on
the point of slipping into the greenish waters.
Drawn by our oxen we cross it at a foot's
pace, almost asleep. On the further side opens
a gateway, surmounted by turrets like tiaras,
and flanked by two gigantic cobra serpents
which rear up and display, in the form of a
fan, their seven heads of stone.
And, having passed through this gateway,
we are within the outer walls, which have a
circumference of more than a league : a mourn-
ful, enclosed solitude, resembling a neglected
garden, with brambles entwined with fragrant
jasmine, out of which rise, here and there, ruins
of little towers, statues with closed eyes, and
the multiple heads of the sacred cobra.
The sun is scorching now that we have left the
shade of the thick branches. An avenue paved
with grey-coloured stones stretches before us
its diminishing line, leading straight to the
sanctuary, the gigantic mass of which now
dominates everything. A sinister kind of avenue
it seems, passing thus through a little desert,
strangely mysterious, and leading to ruins under
a sun of death. But as we draw nearer to this
temple, which we had thought vowed to a
perpetual silence, a sound of soft music comes
56
Siam
more and more clearly to our ears, which are a
little bothered, if the truth be told, by the
feverish heat and the longing for sleep. For
all that it is clearly a sound of music, distinct
from the concert of the insects and the creak-
ing of our ox-carts. It resembles vaguely the
sound of innumerable human voices chanting a
slow psalmody. Who can they be that sing
thus amongst the ruins in spite of the over-
powering heaviness of mid-day ?
At the very foot of this crushing mass of
sculptured stone, of terraces and stairways, and
towers that soar into the sky, we come upon
the village from which these chanted prayers
proceed. Overhung by tall, frail palm-trees are
a few little houses on piles, constructed very
lightly of wood and mats, with elegant little
festooned windows which are quickly adorned
with curious heads at the sound of our approach.
The heads are those of persons with shaven
polls, who are clothed each of them in a lemon-
coloured robe, beneath an orange - coloured
drapery. They chant in a subdued voice, and
continue to watch us without interrupting their
tranquil litany.
It is a very singular village this, without
women, without cattle, without cultivation,
57
Siam
nothing but these singers, yellow in face, and
clothed in two shades of yellow. About two
hundred monks from Cambodia and Siam,
dedicated to the guardianship of the sacred
ruins, live there in continual prayer, chanting
night and day before this heaped-up mountain
of titanic stones.
The arrival of our carts, however, and our
oxen and drivers interrupts for a moment their
peaceful contemplation. To give us welcome
two from amongst them descend from their
perched-up houses, and, with polls shining in the
sunlight, advance to meet us, without haste or
embarrassment, in the overpowering heat which
now falls perpendicularly upon the earth, and
which the earth gives back with added un-
wholesomeness and moisture.
They offer us as lodging the large shelter
provided for the use of the faithful during the
pilgrimages. Raised on piles like the houses, it
consists of a kind of open-work floor with a roof
of thatch supported by pillars of reddish wood.
It boasts no wall, and to screen us, night and
day, we have only the transparent curtains of
our mosquito nets. By way of furniture there
is nothing but an old Buddhist altar, with gods
of fading gold, before which little heaps of
58
Siam
ashes attest the burning of many a perfumed
twig. 1
We lie down there on mats, behind the muslin
curtains which have been hastily hung, happy
to be able at last to stretch ourselves some five
or six feet above the ground where the snakes
crawl, happy to feel that our heads are pro-
tected by a veritable roof, under which there
is, if not coolness, at least a deep shade. And
seeking the shade also, the oxen lie down
beneath our dwelling, on the moist, warm
earth.
If there had been any air it would have come
to us from all parts, even from below, for the
very floor is open. But there is none anywhere
at this hour when everything is burning,
motionless and languid. In the midday torpor
all sounds subside, and things themselves
become, as it were, congealed. The eternal
psalmody of the monks, even the murmur of
the insects seem to be muted and to abate.
Through the muslin, as through a fog, we still
see, quite close, disconcertingly close, the
enormous base of the temple, the towers of
1 I am informed that since Angkor came into the possession
of France a house has been built after the fashion of an Indian
bungalow for the accommodation of visitors from Europe.
59
Siam
which we can imagine vanishing above in the
white incandescence.
The heaviness and the mystery of these
immense ruins disquiet me more in measure as
my eyes close, and it is only when sleep is on
the point of making me lapse into unconscious-
ness that I recognise as finally accomplished my
hope of long ago, that I realise that I have
in fact arrived before the ruins of Angkor.
I must have been asleep some two or three
hours when by degrees consciousness returned
to me. What can I have been dreaming of?
I seemed to be in a nameless country, where
everything was mournful and dark. Near me,
on a pale whitish strand, before a sea confused
and black, were moving the silhouetted shapes
of human beings, whom, perhaps, I may have
loved in some previous existence who can tell ?
for I am conscious almost of a pang, when the
broad light of reality, returning suddenly, drives
them into a non-existence beyond recall. Where
am I ? In what region of the earth do I re-open
my eyes? The air is hot with a moist, close
heat, as if I had been lying above a basin of
boiling water. There is shade above my head,
but around me, framed by this kind of fringe
which falls from the thatched roof, are adjacent
60
Siam
things which shimmer in an excess of vivid
light: foliage bathed in sunshine, and inter-
minable rows of grey stones, the reflection of
which dazzles me. And in the air there is a
sound of chanting, a kind of lamentation in
an unknown rhythm. And then I remember
it is the litany of the monks ; and these grey
stones are the eternal courses of the ruins. 1
have been sleeping since midday at the foot
of the temple of Angkor, in this clearing,
guarded by moats and low walls, and surrounded
on all sides in an eternal silence by the thick,
green shroud of the tropical forest.
It is half-past three, the hour when everything
awakes here, after the daily prostration. Beneath
the open-work floor I can hear the oxen moving,
and the drivers beginning again to talk. The
flies buzz in a crescendo, and the chanting of
the monks grows louder.
There is no cloud in the sky, no menace of
any sort. The whole vault is resplendent, palely
blue, above the enormous towers. There seems
no doubt but that the rain is going to spare us
for the afternoon. Let us, then, put the oxen
again to the carts ; instead of visiting the
temple, I will rather go and see the town, which
lies beyond under the shroud of trees. It is some
61
Siam
distance away, this buried city. Whereas there
are scarcely ten yards between my upraised
dwelling and the steps leading to the first
galleries of the Sanctuary; and it will be an
easy thing to visit it at any time, let it rain
how it may.
With the same creaking of wheels, the same
rocking leisureliness, we cross again the park-like
enclosure, passing through the gateway of the
threshold and over the bridge where watch, like
sentinels, the great serpents with their seven
heads.
And, following the vague pathways of the
bush, we plunge again beneath the infinite
covering of the forest. The heat, which weighs
as heavily as ever upon our shoulders, becomes
all at once shady and moist. Little vortices
of mosquitoes envelop us, and we breathe that
peculiar kind of malaria which induces the
" fever of the woods."
We had been travelling for about an hour
through the uninterrupted forest, amongst un-
familiar flowers, when the ramparts of the town
at last rose before us, themselves wrapt in the
deep green night of the forest, beneath the
entanglement of branches. They were defended
formerly by a moat measuring some hundred
62
Siam
yards across, which in the lapse of time has
been filled up by earth and dead leaves, so that
no trace of it remains ; and they had a circum-
ference of more than twelve miles. As we
come upon them now they look like rocks,
so high and blunted are they, so disrupted by
the patient labour of roots, so overgrown with
brambles and ferns. The " Gate of Victory,"
under which we are about to pass, might at
first sight be mistaken for the entrance to a
cavern overhung with creepers.
In epochs that are uncertain, this town, buried
now for many centuries, was one of the glories
of the world. Just as the old Nile, by virtue
merely of its slime, had reared in its valley a
marvellous civilization, so here the Mekong,
spreading each year its waters, had deposited a
richness, and prepared the way for the proud
empire of the Khmers. It was probably in the
time of Alexander the Macedonian, that a people,
emigrated from India, came and settled on the
banks of this great river, after subjugating the
timid natives men with little eyes, worshippers
of the serpent. The conquerors brought with
them the gods of Brahmanism and the beauti-
ful legends of the Ramayana ; and as their
opulence increased on this fertile soil, they
63
Siam
built everywhere gigantic temples, carved with a
thousand figures.
Later some centuries later, one cannot well
say how many, for the existence of this people
is much effaced from the memory of man the
powerful sovereigns of Angkor saw, arriving
from the East, missionaries in yellow robes,
bearers of the new light at which the Asiatic
world was wondering. Buddha, the predecessor
of his brother Jesus, had achieved the enlighten-
ment of India, and his emissaries were spreading
over the east of Asia, to preach there that same
gospel of pity and love which the disciples of
Christ had recently brought to Europe. Then
the savage temples of Brahma became Buddhist
temples ; the statues of the altars changed their
attitudes and lowered their eyes with gentler
smiles.
It would seem that under Buddhism the town
of Angkor knew the apogee of its glory. But
the history of its swift and mysterious decline
has never been written, and the invading forest
guards the secret of it. The little Cambodia
of to-day, the repository and preserver of com-
plicated rites of which the significance is no
longer known, is a last remnant of that vast
empire of the Khmers, which for more than
Siam
five hundred years now has been buried under
the silence of trees and weeds.
Through the gloom then we approach the
" Gate of Victory," which at first seemed to
us the entrance of a cave. It is surmounted,
nevertheless, with monstrous representations of
Brahma, which are hidden from us by the
entwined branches, and on either side, in a kind
of niche overhung by foliage, shapeless triple-
headed elephants wait as if in ambush.
Beyond this gate crowned with gloomy visages,
we penetrate into what was once the immense
town. It is well that one should be advised of
it, for, within the walls, the forest continues, as
deep in shade, as serried as without, and the
age-old branches bate nothing of their height.
We descend from our carts at this point and
advance on foot by pathways that are scarcely
discernible, tracks, as they might be, of wild
beasts. For guide I have my Cambodian
interpreter who is a familiar of the ruins ; and
as I follow him the sound of our footsteps
is smothered in the herbage, and we hear only
the quiet gliding of the snakes, the nimble
flight of the monkeys.
Scarcely recognisable debris of architecture
may be seen, however, on every side, mingled
65 E
Siam
with and almost concealed by ferns and cycads
and orchids, by all that flora of the eternal
twilight which flourishes here beneath the vault
of the high trees. A number of Buddhist idols,
some small, some of medium size, and some
giantlike, seated on thrones are smiling at
nothing. They had been carved out of hard
stone, and have remained, each in its place, after
the downfall of the temples, which it would
seem must have been made of sculptured wood.
In almost every case pious pilgrims have made
for them a roof of thatch as a shelter from the
heavy storm showers ; some one has even burnt
sticks of incense to them, and brought them
flowers. But no monks dwell in their neighbour-
hood on account of the dreaded " fever of the
woods," which makes it dangerous to sleep under
the thickness of the green tufts, and even at
the times of the great pilgrimages they are left
to pass their nights in solitude.
Here once were palaces ; here lived kings in
all the glory of their prodigious pride, of whom
we now know nothing, who have passed into
oblivion without leaving so much as a name
graven on a stone or in a memory. They have
been built by men, these towering rocks, which
are now made one with the forest, entwined and
66
Siam
crushed by thousands of roots, as in the tentacles
of an octopus.
For there is a passion for destruction even
amongst the plants. The Prince of Death,
called by the Brahmans Shiva, he who for
each kind of animal has created the particular
enemy which destroys it, for every creature
its devouring worm, seems to have foreseen in
the very night of the beginning of the world,
that men would try to perpetuate themselves
a little by building things that might endure.
And so, to annihilate their work, he conceived,
amongst a thousand other agents of destruc-
tion, the species of plant known as the parietary,
and, chief of all, the " fig-tree of ruins " which
nothing is able to withstand.
The "fig-tree of ruins" reigns to-day as
undisputed master over Angkor. Above the
palaces, above the temples, which it has
patiently disintegrated, it flaunts everywhere
in triumph its pale, sleek branches, spotted like
a snake, and its large dome of leaves. At the
beginning it was only a small grain, sown by
the wind on a frieze or on the summit of a
tower. But no sooner did it germinate than
its roots, like tenuous filaments, insinuated their
way between the stones, and proceeded to
67
Siam
descend, descend, guided by a sure instinct,
towards the earth. And when, at last, they
reached the earth, they quickly swelled, waxing
on the nourishing juices, until they became
enormous, disjoining, displacing everything,
cleaving from top to bottom the thick walls ;
and then the building was irretrievably lost.
The forest, always the forest, and always
its shadow, its sovereign oppression. One
feels instinctively that it is hostile, murderous,
that it breeds fever and death ; and at last
one is seized with a desire to escape from it-
it seems to imprison it is terrifying. And
then, suddenly, the rare birds that were singing
become silent ; and, suddenly, too, we are aware
of a deeper obscurity. And yet the hour is
not late. There must be something more
than the thickness of the overhanging verdure
to make the pathways seem so dark. A
general drumming on the leaves announces
the advent of a tropical deluge. We had not
seen that, above the trees, the sky had suddenly
become black. The water streams, pours in
torrents upon our heads. Quickly, let us take
refuge over there, near to that large, con-
templative Buddha, in the shelter of his roof
of thatch.
68
Siam
The involuntary hospitality of the god lasts
for a considerable time, and there is in it some-
thing inexpressibly mournful in the mystery of
the forest twilight, at the fading of the day.
When, at length, the deluge abates, it is time
to take our departure if we wish to avoid
being overtaken by the night in the forest.
But we have almost reached Bayon, the
most ancient of the sanctuaries of Angkor,
celebrated for its quadruple - visaged towers.
Through the semi-obscurity of the forest trees
we can see it from where we stand, looking
like a chaotic heap of rocks. We decide to
take the risk and go to see it.
Through an inextricable tangle of dripping
brambles and creepers, we have to beat our
way with sticks in order to reach the temple.
The forest entwines it strictly on every side,
chokes it, crushes it ; and to complete the
destruction, immense "fig-trees" are installed
there everywhere, up to the very summit of
its towers, which serve them as a kind of
pedestal. Here are the doors ; roots, like aged
beards, drape them with a thousand fringes ;
at this hour when it is already growing late,
in the obscurity which descends from the trees
and the rain-charged sky, they are deep, dark
69
Siam
holes, which give one pause. From the first
entrance that we reach, some monkeys which
had come there for shelter, and were sitting in
circle as if for some council, make their escape,
without haste and without cry; it seems that
in this place silence is imposed upon every-
thing. We hear only the furtive sound of
the water as it drips from the trees and stones
after the storm.
My Cambodian guide is insistent that we
should depart. We have no lanterns, he tells
me, on our carts, and it behoves us to
return before the hour of the tiger. So be
it, let us go. But we make up our mind
to return, expressly to visit this temple so
infinitely mysterious.
Before I leave, however, I raise my eyes
to look at the towers which overhang me,
drowned in verdure, and I shudder suddenly
with an indefinable fear as 1 perceive, falling
upon me from above, a huge, fixed smile ; and
then another smile again, beyond, on another
stretch of wall, . . . and then three, and then
five, and then ten. They appear everywhere,
and I realise that I have been overlooked from
all sides by the faces of the quadrupled-visaged
towers, I had forgotten them, although I had
70
Siam
been advised of their existence. They are
of a size, these masks carved in the air, so
far exceeding human proportions that it
requires a moment or two fully to compre-
hend them. They smile under their great
flat noses, and half close their eyelids, with
an indescribable air of senile femininity, look-
ing like aged dames discreetly sly. They are
likenesses of the gods worshipped, in times
obliterated, by those men whose history is
now unknown ; likenesses from which, in the
lapse of centuries, neither the slow travail of
the forest nor the heavy dissolving rains have
been able to remove the expression, the ironical
good humour, which is somehow more dis-
quieting than the rictus of the monsters of
China.
Our oxen trot smartly on the return journey,
as if they, too, realised that it was necessary to
escape before nightfall from this soaked and
steaming forest, which now becomes dark almost
suddenly, without any interval of twilight. And
the memory of those over-large old dames, who
are smiling yonder behind us, secretive above
the heaps of ruins, continues to pursue me
throughout the course of our jolting, rocking
flight through the bush.
71
Siam
When at length I reach the open air again,
before the large pools of water-lilies at the
entrance to the cyclops bridge, the clear-swept
sky has assumed a crystal-like clearness, and it
is the hour when the stars begin to scintillate.
At the further end of the glade, which now
reappears, the towers of the temple of Angkor-
Vat rise up very high. They are no longer, as
at midday, pale and almost nebulous from the
excess of sunlight; they stand out now with
vivid clearness, outlining with the sharpness of
a punching machine, against the background of
greenish gold, the silhouettes of their elabor-
ately wrought tiaras ; and a large star, one of
the first to be enkindled, shines above, magnifi-
cently. Then there comes back to me, like a
refrain, the childish phrase of long ago : " In the
depths of the forests of Siam, I have seen the
star of evening rise over the ruins of Angkor."
After the stifling of the vaults of trees, after
the forest full of ambushes, one gets at once a
feeling of security, a sense of being at home,
in returning to the immense enclosure of the
temple, where the bushes are scarcely taller
than a man, and the paved causeway goes
straight and sure towards a semblance of a
village. The chanting of the monks is also
72
Siam
there to welcome me, and when I climb by the
little ladder into my dwelling, built on piles
and without walls as it is, all seems hospitable
and good to me.
It is in the dead of night, preceded by a
Siamese torch-bearer, that I cross at last the
threshold of the colossal temple of Angkor -
Vat. It had been my original intention not to
begin the pilgrimage before to-morrow at day-
break ; but I was tempted by the proximity
of the temple, the stupendous mass of which
seemed almost to overhang my frail lodging.
Mounting a flight of granite steps we reach
a gallery of prodigious length, which has the
intimidating sonority, and seemed at first to
have the silence of a cave ; but no sooner do
we enter than it is filled at once with a multi-
tudinous sound of rustling.
This is the exterior gallery, which forms a
square, of a side some two hundred and fifty
yards long, and surrounds, like a sumptuous
outer corridor, the staged entanglement of the
central buildings. Its flagstones are carpeted
with a nameless soft substance which yields to
our footsteps, shedding a mingled odour of
musk and dung. And to the rustling which
73
Siam
greeted our arrival are now added little pierc-
ing cries, which spread before us into the
obscure distances.
As we pass our torch reveals to us, on the
dark grey walls, an inextricable medley of
warriors gesticulating furiously ; along the whole
length of the gallery, an uninterrupted bas-relief
stretches out of sight its tale of battles, of com-
batants in thousands, of caparisoned elephants,
of monsters, of war - chariots. ... I have
no intention of venturing to-night into the
dangerous labyrinth of the centre, into the
temple properly so-called, but I should like to
make the circuit of the outer galleries, which
are so straight and look so easy, and to continue
to follow to the end the unrolling of the bas-
relief. But I am troubled by these little pierc-
ing cries above my head, which are multiplied
in concert, as if uttered by thousands of rats.
. . . And then, high up, where one would look
to see the stones of the vault, does it not seem
that there is a quivering of black substances?
. . . Oh ! the adorable creatures carved here
and there upon the walls, as if to afford a respite
to the eyes from the long battle : holding in
their hand a lotus flower, they stand two by
two, or three by three, calm and smiling
74
Siam
beneath their archaic tiaras. They are the
divine Apsaras of the Hindoo theogonies. How
lovingly the artists of old have chiselled and
polished their Virgin -like breasts ! . . . What
has become, I wonder, of the dust of the
beauties from whom their perfect bodies were
copied? . . . Horror! the vault here sinks to-
wards us, or at least the quivering black stuffs
which seem to be suspended from it. ... They
descend so as to touch our hair ; we can feel the
wind they make like a vigorous fanning. . . .
Hairy bodies moving very rapidly long hair-
less wings. ... It was these, then, that uttered
those cries above, like so many rats. . . . We
are beset from all sides . . . enormous bats, in
a cloud, in an avalanche, maddened, aggressive,
. . . they threaten to extinguish our little
mockery of a light. Quick, let us escape,
make for the doors ; this temple obviously
ought not to be profaned in the solemn hours
of the night.
Outside, sudden peace, serenity of sky, and
splendour of stars. We arrest the course of our
flight to inhale deliciously ; the air is fragrant
with jasmine, and the tranquil psalmody of the
monks, after those multitudinous cries, seems
an exquisite music. All those tortured figures
75
Siam
which peopled the walls, and all those contacts
of horrible wings. . . . Ugh ! from what hideous
nightmare have we escaped ?
It is the enchanted hour of these regions, the
hour when the brazier of the sun is extinguished,
and the evil dew has not begun to shed its
moisture. In the immense glade, defended
by moats and walls, in the middle of which
the temple is throned, one has a feeling of
complete security, notwithstanding the sur-
roundings and the proximity of the great
forests. The tigers do not cross the bridges
of stone, although now the gates are never
shut, and, save for some curious monkeys, the
beasts of the forests respect the enclosed park
where men dwell and sing.
And the long causeway is there, stretching
before me, whitish in the night, between the
dark tufts of the bushes scented with jasmine
and tuberose. Without aim, 1 begin to wander
slowly over its flagstones, getting further and
further away from the temple, hearing less and
less distinctly the song of the monks, which
by degrees dies away behind me into the
infinite silence.
I wander on and on until I reach the water-
lilied moat, with its bridge guarded by the
76
Siam
seven - headed serpents. On the further bank
the forest spreads its high black curtain ; it draws
me to it, with its air of sleep and mystery.
Without entering it, what if I went just so far
as the edge of its tall trees, surcharged now
with night, where so many sleepless ears must
already have heard me. And cautiously I pass
through the portico, making sure of each stone
upon which, gropingly, I set my foot ; in such
darkness as this, the bridge is formidable to
cross.
But I seem to hear light footsteps running
towards me from behind. Are they men or
monkeys ? And before I have time to turn
round I feel myself taken by the hand, but
without any sort of roughness, and two human
shapes appear, who seek to detain me. I
recognise them at once they are two of my
worthy Siamese ox-drivers. What do they want
with me ? To understand one another we have
no single word of any language in common.
But they make clear to me by signs that it
is foolhardy to proceed further ; there are
ambushes yonder, and there are beasts with
teeth that bite. And I let them have their
way and lead me back.
They bring me to a corner of election, where
77
Siam
some other ox-drivers, also of my company, are
stretched smoking cigarettes in the enjoyment
of the cool air. It is on the wide, low rampart
wall, which forms a kind of terrace above the
defending moat. It seems that I am expected
to lie down too. To do so on the earth itself
would be impossible on account of the numerous
sly, poisonous things which crawl in the grass ;
but on the old polished flagstones there is no
sort of risk. One of the drivers takes off the
thin tunic which covered his copper-coloured
body, and, rolling it into a ball, makes a pillow
for my head ; after which I must needs smoke
one of their cigarettes which exhales a strangely
pleasant and soothing odour of burning herb.
We know not how to talk to one another, but
no doubt because silence here has in it some-
thing intimidating one of the young drivers in-
tones very softly in falsetto a little lullaby
which sounds like the lament of some spirit
of the ruins ; merely to hear it makes me feel
that I have wandered far, into a country at
once unknown and incomprehensible. And the
constellations, too, which above my upturned
head shine in the blue black of the infinite,
make to me in their own way a permanent
signal of exile. The Great Bear, which is
78
Siam
throned on high in our nights of France, seems
to have slipped down the sky ; it has almost
disappeared below the horizon ; while, on the
opposite side, I see shining, very significantly,
the Southern Cross.
It is at first a delicious sensation to recline
thus, half-naked, confident of the equable and
caressing warmth of an atmosphere which never
at any time grows chill, in which one knows
that there will never rise a breeze that is not
gentle. But the moments of well-being in
these regions are numbered ; around us a slight
humming sound, faint to begin with, swells
minute by minute, and becomes general: the
mosquitoes are assembling, having scented from
a distance the unwonted odour of flesh. And
already, too, the linen with which I am
clothed begins to soften and grow damp. The
eternal moisture of these regions, which had
made truce for an hour or two, reappears now
in the form of dew. We are powdered, as it
were, with tiny drops of water, and it behoves
us to seek shelter at the foot of the temple,
in the village of the chanting monks, beneath
the hangar of the pilgrims.
It is under this hangar, protected by its little
altar to Buddha, that I prepare at last to
79
Siam
sleep. The piles upraise me from the ground
where poisonous beasts crawl, and an outspread
curtain of muslin is my protection against the
beasts that prey. Around me the yellow ox-
drivers of my train instal themselves, and, as
they have no mosquito nets, they arrange to
take turns until the morning in maintaining,
beneath the open-work flooring of our lodging,
a large fire of herbs, which will envelop us
all in a protecting cloud. And, lulled by the
Buddhist chant, I soon fall into a deep sleep,
in the midst of an odorous smoke.
80
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER VIII
Friday, 29th November 1901.
1 AM awakened at dawn by the matinal crescendo
of the psalmodies. There has been such an excess
of humidity during the night, so heavy a dew,
that in spite of the thatched roof everything
around me and on me is soaked, as after a
shower.
In the comparative freshness of the early
morning, I climb again the first steps of the
temple, between the worn balustrades, defaced
by the rains of centuries. And, mindful of
the guardian bats, I enter with an excess of
caution, making no more noise than a cat. My
enemies of last night are all asleep above,
hanging, head downwards, by their claws to
the stones of the ceiling, and simulating at
this hour myriads of little bags of dark-coloured
velvet. I have entered now, and none of them
has so much as moved. I recognise the gallery,
with its resonance as of a cave, which is decorated,
83
Siam
as far as eye can see, with the endless bas-relief
of battles. And now that I see it in its
entirety, diminishing before me in unbroken
perspective, it seems even more infinitely long
than before. A green half light has replaced
all at once the clear daylight that was broaden-
ing outside. There is a smell of dampness, such
as one meets in subterranean places, but it is
dominated here by the fusty musk-scented odour
of the excrement of the bats, which is deposited
in a layer upon the ground as if a rain of
brown grains fell constantly from the vault.
To illumine the unfolding of the bas-relief,
which covers all the interior wall of the gallery,
windows at intervals open on to the surround-
ing park, and admit an attenuated light, made
green by the foliage and palms. Very sumptuous
windows, too, framed with carvings so delicate
that one might think lace had been overlaid on
the stone. They have annulated bars, which
look like little columns of wood, elaborately
turned by lathe, but are, in fact, of sandstone,
like the rest of the walls.
This bas-relief, which stretches its medley of
personages for more than a thousand yards, on
the four sides of the temple, is inspired by one
of the most ancient epics conceived by the
84
r;o * ^ s '- <
"
Siam
men of Asia those Aryans who were our
ancestors.
" Formerly, in the age called Kuta, lived
the sons of Kyacyapa, who were of superhuman
strength and beauty. They had been born
of two sisters, Diti and Aditi. But the sons
of Aditi were gods, while the sons of Diti
were demons.
" One day when they were all assembled in
council to discover a means by which they
might escape old age and death, they decided
to gather all those plants of the woods which
are called simples, to cast them into the ocean,
and then to churn the ocean. There would
result from this a magic beverage which would
conquer death and make them strong and
beautiful for ever.
" Accordingly they made a churn with a
mountain, and a cord with the great holy
serpent Vasuki, and set themselves to churn
unceasingly.
"Presently, from the swirling waters, arose
the Apsaras, celestial dancers and courtesans,
who were of a beauty beyond compare. The
Gandharwas, the demi-gods, took them to wife,
and they gave birth to the race of monkeys.
" Then there appeared in person the beautiful
Varuni, daughter of the Ocean, whom the sons
of Aditi espoused. And finally, on the surface
85
Siam
of the waters, they saw forming the marvellous
liquor which was to triumph over death. But
for its possession a war of extermination began
between the sons of Diti and the sons of
Aditi, and the sons of Aditi conquered."
Such in brief summary is the theme of the
Ramayana, that ancestral legend which has
come down to us thanks to the labours of the
pious Valmiki, who in the night of time, took
pains to transcribe and perpetuate it in a poem
of twenty-five thousand verses.
The churning of the ocean alone fills a panel
more than fifty yards long. Then come the
battles of the gods and demons, and those of
the monkeys against the evil spirits of the Isle
of Ceylon, who had ravished the beautiful Sita,
the spouse of Rama.
All these pictures, which formerly were painted
and gilded, have taken on, under the oozings
of the eternal dampness, a mournful blackish
colour, varied in places by glistenings of actual
wetness. And, moreover, the bas-relief, which
measures some sixteen feet in height, is worn, as
high as a man can reach, by the secular friction
of fingers for in the times of pilgrimage the
whole multitude makes it a duty to touch it.
Here and there, in the parts illumined by the
86
Siam
beautiful windows with their wreathed bars, one
can still see traces of colouring on the robes
and faces ; and sometimes in the tiaras of the
Apsaras, a little gold, spared by time, continues
to shine. As I advance I do not cease to watch
the velvet guardians above ; the flagstones give
out a hollow sound, and when my footsteps
make too great a noise, some pairs of hairless
wings are unfolded ; a bat stretches itself, wakes
another one, and a general stirring ensues.
Then I stand quite still, as if turned to stone,
until all are asleep again.
What is difficult to understand is that the
wall with its multitude of figures seems to be
in a single piece over a length of some hundreds
of yards ; it needs a close scrutiny to detect the
joints of the enormous stones which have been
placed together in line without the help of any
cement, and adjusted with the same rigorous
precision as in the monuments of Egyptian
antiquity.
In the middle of each side of the quadrilateral,
a portico opens from this outer gallery and gives
access to the central court, where rises the
pagoda properly so-called, the prodigious mass
of sculptured stone scaling the blue sky. Into
that I hesitate to penetrate, intimidated, perhaps,
87
Siam
or wearied in advance by such an entanglement
of stairways, terraces, and towers, by such a
complication of lines, by the unspeakable grim-
ness which characterises the silent whole. Rather
than enter, I continue to loiter, following the
bas-relief of the outer wall.
In the gallery on the fourth side I encounter
two young monks clothed in lemon -yellow
robes beneath orange yellow draperies. What
are they doing here with a wheel-barrow, a
shovel, and a broom? Nothing more nor less
than gathering the dung of the bats to manure
some little monachal garden. I wonder how
many thousands of millions of insects, eaten in
the air, are represented by these heaps of brown
grains in their barrow, which are on the way
now to fertilise flowers, which will nourish
other insects, which will be eaten by other
bats !
But they are making too much noise, these
young monks although in truth they make
scarcely any for, above, the velvety sleepers
are awakening.
To avoid their hairless wings, I rush hastily
through one of the porticoes into the central
courtyard. And thus, after having lingered for
a long time around the wooded chaos of the
88
Siam
sanctuaries, I enter at last with precipitation, in
an impulse of flight.
It is at a moment when the light all at once
becomes overcast, as if the sun were passing
through some great eclipse. Above the masses
of terraces, of porticoes and stairways, entangled
with prodigal verdure, the clouds have suddenly
spread a canopy of darkness ; a diluvial rain is
about to pour upon the ruins. And all the
beasts which dwell there under the trees and in
the breaches of the walls become silent, attentive
to that which is about to fall.
This temple is one of the places in the world
where men have heaped together the greatest
mass of stones, where they have accumulated
the greatest wealth of sculptures, of ornaments,
of foliage, of flowers, and of faces. It is not
simple as are the lines of Thebes and Baalbeck.
Its complexity is as bewildering even as its
enormity. Monsters guard all the flights of
steps, all the entrances ; the divine Apsaras, in
indefinitely repeated groups, are revealed every-
where amongst the overhanging creepers. And,
at a first view, nothing stands out ; there seem
only disorder and confusion in this hill of carved
stones, on the summit of which the great towers
have sprouted.
89
Siam
But, on the contrary, when one examines it
a little, a perfect symmetry is manifest from top
to base. The hill of sculptured stones forms a
square pyramid of three stages, the base of
which measures more than a thousand yards in
circumference ; and it is on the third and highest
of these stages that we shall find, no doubt, that
which is pre-eminently the holy place. We
have to climb, therefore I was prepared for it
to climb by steep and uneven steps, between the
smiling Apsaras, the crouching lions, the holy
serpents spreading like a fan their seven heads,
and the languid verdure, which at this moment
is motionless in the still air ; to climb in haste,
too, so as to reach the top before the deluge
begins. In coming here this morning, I had
imagined that the ascent would be made under
a blue sky and in the glare of the sun ; that
the branches would be astir with gentle breezes,
and that around me I should hear the sounds of
birds, insects, and reptiles as they fled at my
approach. But this mournful stillness daunts
me ; I was not prepared for this silence of
waiting or for this black sky. My arrival
wakens not a single sound, not a single move-
ment, and even the sing-song of the monks, as
they chant without ceasing at the foot of the
90
Siam
temple, reaches me only very faintly, from
the distance.
And now I have reached the first of the three
platforms. Before me rises the second stage, of
a height double that of the first, presenting
stairways more abrupt, more guarded by smiles
and rictus of stone. It is surrounded on its
four sides by a vaulted gallery, a kind of
cloister, immense and pompously magnificent,
with its excess of carvings, its porticoes crowned
with strange, elaborate frontals, with its narrow
windows, the stone bars of which, already too
massive, are brought * close together as if the
better to imprison you. All around the dilapida-
tion is extreme. Within, the decoration is
simpler than in the corridors of the base. The
place is damp and dark, and there is an almost
intolerable odour of bats ; they cover the vault,
these suspended sleepers . . . At this height
I no longer hear anything of the litany of the
monks, and the silence is so profound that one
scarcely dares to walk.
The second platform is surrounded like the
first by a cloister, the facades of which are
wrought with as much elaboration as the most
patient embroideries. Here one might reason-
ably think that he was nearly there ; but now
91
Siam
the third stage rises, of a height double that of
the second, and the monumental stairway that
leads up to it, with its worn, grass-grown steps,
is so steep that it induces a sensation of vertigo,
The gods desire, no doubt, to make themselves
more inaccessible in proportion as one endeavours
to approach them. And verily the temple
seems to grow higher, to stretch out, to reach
up towards the darkling sky, and it is a little
like those baffling dreams in which we strive
madly to reach a goal which flies before us ...
There should be four of these staircases, watched
over by smiling Apsaras, one on each of the
sides of the enormous pedestal ; but I have not
time to choose the best, for the shadow of
the clouds grows ever deeper, and the storm
is at hand. I mount, almost running, and the
forest, the sovereign forest, seems to rise at the
same time ; on every side it begins to stretch
its circle to the horizon like a sea.
Here now is the third square platform,
bordered also with its cloister, the facades of
which are carved even more magnificently still.
In high relief on the walls are the inevitable
Apsaras standing in groups, and welcoming me
with smiles of quiet mockery, the eyes half-
closed. On this, the highest of the terraces,
92
A WINDOW, ANGKOR-VAT
Siam
where I reach the bases of the towers, and the
very doors of the sanctuary, I must be about
a hundred feet above the level of the plains.
And here the illusion is reversed. It seems
now that it is the temple which has sunk into
the forest. Seen from here it looks to be sub-
merged, buried up to its middle in verdure.
Below me, three graduated courses of cloisters,
of high-crowned porticoes, of sumptuous vaults,
scarcely broken by the centuries, have plunged,
as it were, into the trees, into the silent expanse
of trees, the tufts of which, in the distance,
and as far as eye can see, simulate the undula-
tions of an ocean swell.
The rain ! A few first drops, astonishingly
large and heavy, by way of warning. And then
almost at once the general drumming on the
leaves, torrents of water which descend with
fury. Then, through a portico, the over-loaded
frontal of which is in the form of flames and
horns, running to take shelter, I enter at least
what must be the sanctuary itself.
I expected an immense hall, where I should
be alone, whereas it is only another gallery
infinitely long but narrow, oppressive, sinister
in which I shudder almost at meeting, in the
half-light of the storm and the barred windows,
93
Siam
a number of motionless people people eaten by
worms, corpses and phantoms of gods, seated
and foundering along the walls.
The majority are of human stature, but some
are giantlike, and others are dwarfs. Some
are of a dull grey, others of blood-coloured
red, and here and there a little gilding, as in
the masks of the mummies, shines still on
certain of the faces. Many are without hands,
without arms, without head, and a mass of
excrement, the offering of our friends the bats,
humps their back, deforms their shoulders.
And when I raise my eyes, how the sight fills
me with disgust ! For here, more even than
below, the stone ceilings are tapestried with
these little velvet pockets which hang sus-
pended by their claws, and want but the
slightest noise to unfold and become a whirl-
wind of wings. The interior of the thick,
blackish walls, void of any kind of ornament,
are half concealed by fine spun draperies, like
funereal crapes, which are the work of in-
numerable spiders. Without, I hear the storm
raging. Everything is inundated ; the water
streams in veritable cascades. I breathe a
warm vapour at once fetid and musk-scented.
In the long gallery the closeness of the walls
94
Siam
and the enormous size of the sandstone columns
which mask the openings induce a feeling of
confinement ; and this, notwithstanding that
the circle of the horizon, seen between the
same window bars, supports the notion of
altitude, serves as a reminder that one dominates,
from the height of this kind of aerial prison,
the infinite expanse of the sodden forest.
This, then, is the sanctuary which haunted
many years ago my childish imagination.
I reach it at last only after many journey ings
about the world, in what is already the evening
of my wandering life. It gives me mournful
welcome. I had not foreseen these torrents of
rain, this confinement amongst the webs of
spiders, nor my present solitude in the midst
of so many phantom gods. There is a person-
age beyond, conspicuous amongst them all,
reddish in colour like a flayed corpse, with
feet worm-eaten and crumbling, who, in order
that he may not fall altogether, leans crosswise
against the wall, half-upturning his face with
its scarred lips. It is from him, it seems, that
all the silence and all the unutterable sadness
of the place proceed.
A prisoner here for so long as the storm may
last, I go first of all to a window, instinctively,
95
Siam
to get more air, to escape from the odour
of the bats. And between the rigid spindle-
shaped bars, I see sloping below me the
architectural mass which I have just ascended.
On the sides of the ruins, all the foliage bends
and trembles, overwhelmed by the tumultuous
downpour. The legions of Apsaras, the great
holy serpents, the monsters crouching on the
threshold of the flights of steps, seem to bow
the head under the daily deluge, which, for
seasons without number, has worn by dint of
washing them. More and more I hear the
water crackling, rushing in a thousand streams.
In order to discern the general plan of this
third and highest platform, it would be
necessary to see it from outside. But the
light continues to diminish, as if it were the
twilight instead of the morning ; the horizon of
the forests is completely hidden behind the
opaque curtains of the rain, and it is clear
that the storm will last for another hour at
least. I have, perforce, to remain in shelter,
and, in this persistent twilight of eclipse, feeling
that I am followed by the cadaverous smiles
of all this assembly of Buddhas, who are
watching me, I proceed towards what must
be the centre and very heart of Angkor- Vat.
96
Siam
I tread softly on the layers of dust and
excrement, sprinkled with feathers of owls.
The huge, hairy spiders, weavers of the multiple
draperies, remain motionless and on watch.
Over and above that which falls unceasingly
from the roof, little heaps of withered flowers
and incense appear before all the idols, attest-
ing that men venerate them still. But why do
not people dust them a little when they come
to visit them ? And in what disorder, too, they
have been left ! the small, the large, and the
colossal, all higgledy-piggledy as after a rout.
At the uncertain date of the sack of the town
and the pillage of the temple they were all
overthrown and dragged to earth. Sub-
sequently the piety of the Siamese put them
upright again, as best it could, but in a
methodless grouping along the walls, those of
sandstone against those of worm-eaten wood,
which crumble to powder at the slightest touch,
those which have lost their colouring side by
side with those which still possess red robes
and gilded faces. (And, lest they should forget
a single one of them in their devotions, the
pilgrims who come hither spend hours, it
seems, in passing through the endless galleries
where they repose.) Buddhist statues, already
97 G
Siam
centenarian many times over, they were yet
new-comers, quite recent intruders in this
temple of a far more ancient cult. And having
supplanted the images of Brahma, the primitive
god of Angkor, they are now fallen in their
turn, destroyed by time.
The flagstones are so carpeted with filth
and ashes that the sound of my footsteps is
smothered, and, without being heard by the
thousands of little ears above, I make my way
towards the darker end of the gallery, between
the two rows of silent personages. Here,
formerly, was the Holy of Holies, the place
where the supreme Brahma was enthroned ;
but it has been walled up for an unknown
period of time.
And before this wall which, no doubt, still
encloses the terrible idol, and perhaps preserves
it as intact as a mummy in its sarcophagus
a Buddha of gigantic size, commanding and
gentle, has been seated for centuries, with legs
crossed and downcast half- closed eyes, for so
many centuries that the spiders have contrived
patiently to drape him with black muslins,
hiding the gold with which he is adorned, and
that the bats have had time to cover him as
with a thick mantle. The swarm of horrible
Siam
little sleeping beasts forms now a kind of
padded dais of brown plush above his head,
and the rain, which continues to stream
mercilessly outside, makes for him its plaintive
daily music. But his bowed head, which I
can distinguish in spite of the darkness,
preserves the same smile as may be found on
all representations of Him, from Thibet to
China : the smile of the Great Peace, obtained
by the Great Renunciation and the Great Pity.
This evening, as I once more ascend to the
temple, after having slept below, at its foot, in
the hangar of the pilgrims, during the heat of the
day, this evening one would nevei believe that
it had rained in torrents all the morning. In
the sky is a blue splendour that seems immut-
able. The earth has quickly drunk up the
superabundant water, and the burning sun has
dried the trees of the forest and the verdure
which encroaches upon the ruins. All is lumin-
ous, calm, and hot, much more so than in the
finest of our summer days. The Apsaras, the
monsters, the half-effaced bas-reliefs, the masses
of immense dead stones, are bathed now in a
sort of ironical and mournful magnificence.
And the thousands of little invaders of the
99
Siam
sanctuary, those which fly, those which " run,
and those which crawl, have emerged from their
hiding-places of the morning, and begun again
their insatiate hunt for provender. All around
I hear the rustling of serpents and lizards, the
singing of turtle-doves and little birds, the
meowing of wild cats. Large butterflies, like
figurings of precious silks, career about, and
myriads of flies, in corselets of velvet and golden
green, mingle with the psalmody of the monks
a murmur like the distant pealing of bells. The
bats alone, the inevitable bats, prime masters of
Angkor- Vat, sleep on in their perpetual shadow,
glued to the vaults of the cloisters.
With time and neglect each of the superposed
terraces of the temple has become a kind of
suspended garden where the immense leaves of
the banana palms are mingled with the white
tufts of a most fragrant jasmine clustered with
blossom. All this, and a thousand other exotic
plants and the tall wanton herbage all this,
after seeming to die beneath the whipping of
the rain, has risen again more vigorous than
before, and with a freshness more sparkling
amidst the decrepitude of the stones.
Without hurrying this time, for no cloud
threatens me, I climb the arduous steps which
100
Siam
lead, above, to the dwelling of the gods. Oh,
the graceful and exquisite carvings scattered in
profusion everywhere ! These scrolls, these
traceries of leaf and flower how inexplicable
it seems resemble those which appeared in
France in the time of Francis I. and the
Medicis. For a moment one might be tempted
to believe, if it were not an impossibility, that
the artists of our Renascence had sought their
models on these walls, which, nevertheless, in
their days had been slumbering for three or
four centuries, in the midst of forests, quite
unsuspected by Europe.
I climb without haste, lighted by a sun of
dazzlement and death, and along my laborious
ascending route is marshalled an endless array
of intimidating symbols. Everywhere monsters,
and combats of monsters. Everywhere the
sacred Naga, trailing over the balustrades its
long, undulating body, and then rearing like
a scarecrow its seven viperish heads. The
Apsaras, how pretty and smiling they are, in
their coiffures of goddesses, with, nevertheless,
always that expression of reserve and mystery
which is so little reassuring. Richly adorned,
with bracelets, necklaces, headbands of precious
stones, tall tiaras, either pointed or surmounted
101
Siam
with a tuft of plumes, they hold between their
delicate fingers sometimes a lotus flower, and
sometimes an enigmatic emblem. And all of
them that one can reach in passing have been
so often caressed in the course of centuries, that
their beautiful bare bosoms shine as under a
varnish. For the women, who come hither
during the pilgrimages, touch them passionately
in order that they may obtain from them the
grace to become mothers. In their niches em-
broidered with carvings, they remain adorable.
But what a pity that their feet should so dis-
figure them ! They are always enormous as in
the bas-reliefs of Egypt, and always drawn in
profile, whilst the legs face you fully. And yet
there is cause for reflection, too, in these ineptly
drawn feet, for they remind us that the fair
goddesses are the work of a very primitive
humanity, which in its art was still battling
with the difficulties of draughtsmanship, still
baffled by the mystery of foreshortening.
And there is another thing of which they were
ignorant, those proud architects of Angkor- Vat,
and that is the wide expanded vault. Their
ancestors had taught them only that which is
obtained by corbelling, and must perforce remain
narrow and heavy. That is why all the galleries
102
A DOOR-POST, ANGKOR-VAT
Siam
they contrived to build are suffocating, why
they superposed cloisters and cloisters, staged
massive terraces on massive terraces, heaped
blocks on the top of blocks. And this temple,
no doubt, with that of Bay on, foundered in the
neighbouring forest, is the mightiest piling of
stones that men have dared to undertake since
the pyramids of Memphis.
As each stage is reached, there is a momentary
respite of shade, in the hot dampness of the
bordering cloister.
But a sun of fire glares on the last staircase,
which is twice as high as the preceding one,
and the steepest of all, the staircase which leads
to the topmost platform and seems to climb
into the sky. And, truly, this progressive
doubling of the height, from one stage to
another, is a notable architectural discovery for
increasing the size of the temple by an illusion
from which it is difficult to escape. I experience
it this evening as I experienced it this morning
under the dark rain-clouds : it is as if the dwell-
ing of the gods, in measure as you approach it,
flies before you, soaring into the air.
It is designed, too, and in a very effective
way religious, this successive diminution of the
internal decoration, the nearer one approaches
103
Siam
the Holy of Holies. I had already remarked
the employment of similar means in the
Brahmanistic temples of India, more particularly
in those of Ellora, where after a surfeit of
sculpture in the lower galleries, the supreme
symbol is found at last at the bottom of a
savage hall with thick bare walls : the idea
being that the place where the divine symbol
dwells should contain nothing that might dis-
tract the visitors from worship and awe.
Arriving again in the last of the successive
terraces, I enter a gallery of phantom idols,
similar to that in which I took refuge during
the storm, which leads in the darkness to a
door sealed with stones, and before this door,
also, a large Buddha, very gentle in aspect, is
seated as watchman. But this is not the same
gallery as I was in this morning. I do not
recognise the scarred faces of the personages
who inhabit it, and, besides, I have come to
it by different staircases, different porticoes.
It is now about five o'clock, and the golden
rays of the sun are tinged a little with the
red of the evening. There is no slightest
trace of the deluge of the morning. I am able
now to report that, on this platform of the
summit, there are four identical galleries, equally
104
Siam
long, equally populous with funereal hosts, hung
with the same black spider webs, and wadded
on the ceiling with the same sleeping bats.
These four galleries make a cross with equal
arms and converge upon the Holy of Holies,
which marks the centre of the mountain-temple.
But, after the extreme prodigality of ornamenta-
tion in the cloisters below, these highest naves,
richly embellished as they are without, disclose,
in the interior, only square rough -hewn pillars
and rugged and defaced walls. It is the sign that
one should enter here only for prayer, having
freed the spirit from all the false shows of the
world. They were the thresholds of the
Invisible and the Inexpressible, and it needed
there nothing that might recall our vanities,
our earthly luxuries. And in their dark
depths, behind the identical giant Buddhas,
their identical doors, which to-day are sealed,
are closed upon the four faces of the supreme
retreat where, perhaps, the soul of the old
temple subsists still, buried with the terrible
Brahmas.
One of those colossal towers, in outline like
tiaras, which can be seen so far away in the
plain, rises at the end of each arm of the
cross formed by the four naves, and, above
105
Siam
the Holy of Holies where the naves meet, a
fifth tower, the most wonderful and the most
elaborate, surpassing all the others, commands,
from a height of more than two hundred feet,
the thick, green shroud of the forest. Accord-
ing to a learned Chinese writer, who visited this
mysterious empire on the eve of its decline,
about the thirteenth century, and has left us
the only known documents concerning its
magnificence, this central tower was crowned
with a golden lotus, so large that its sacred
flower could be seen shining in the air from
every point of the town, which to-day lies
buried.
In the forest which surrounds me, and is
revealed, under this pure evening sky, clear
and distinct to the circle of the horizon, I had
not noticed this morning a number of trees
of annual foliage, here and there, which are
turning yellow, and shedding their leaves,
because December is at hand. It reminds me
that in coming hither I have, in fact, journeyed
northwards for three or four days, and that
already the country is not absolutely one of
perpetual greenness, as was the Cochin-China
1 have left. And in spite of the powerful,
tranquil heat, an unexpected impression of
106
THE CENTRAL TOWER, ANGKOR-VAT
Siam
autumn, of falling leaves, as in the forests of
France, comes to augment for me all at once
the nameless melancholy of these ruins.
I thought I should be alone to wander till
nightfall in these high galleries. But, while I
am watching, between the massive bars of a
window, the sun, which before setting is turn-
ing everything to fire, some visitors, behind
me, arrive with timid, velvety steps, old grey-
bearded men. Their costumes proclaim them
to be pilgrims from Burmah. Before each
Buddha they make a salutation, deposit a
flower, and light a stick of incense. Even to
the most shapeless debris littering the floor,
they pay a reverence, and whenever the remnant
is in any way recognisable, an arm, a worm-
eaten trunk, a head without a body, they stop
and plant close by, between the joints of the
pavement, one of their burning sticks. And
thus once more the dead and musty air in
which these images and these vestiges are
achieving their return to dust is filled for a
moment with a suave fragrance.
One of the pilgrims, however, the leader of
the band, whispers something which seems to
signify " Let us hasten, night is approach-
ing, and would overtake us in the ruins."
107
Siam
Thereupon they curtail their devotions, their
reverences become more hurried and less
formal. Arrived before the Great Buddha, who,
at the end of the gallery, guards the immured
sanctuary, they select those places where the
gilding of his legs is most faded, and carefully
apply to them sheets of goldleaf which they
extract from a portfolio. Then they depart.
I hear the sound of their quiet footsteps die
away as they descend the steep staircases of
stone. Their departure has suddenly made the
solitude more imposing, and seems to make
the very daylight fade more quickly. Besides
the setting of the sun is so vertical and so
rapid in these regions, which are almost with-
out twilight !
Below me, the darkness has already en-
croached upon the architectural mass of which
I have now a bird's-eye view, and also upon
the expanse of the surrounding forest, where
presently will open, innumerable, the eyes of
the nocturnal beasts. Alone, two towers, which
rise up in my vicinity, are resplendent still,
like glowing embers ; the reddened rays light,
as in apotheosis, their unknown architecture,
which is neither Hindoo nor Chinese, which
resembles that of no other country on the earth.
108
A TOWER, ANGKOR-VAT
Siam
If the ornamentation of the walls, the scrolls,
and foliage, recalled our European Renascence,
these towers, on the contrary, are of a striking
and utter strangeness the conception of a
race apart, which flashed a bright splendour in
this corner of the world, and then disappeared
to return no more. They resemble somewhat
sheaves of organ-pipes, above which have been
placed, at the various heights, richly ornamented
crowns. The design is complicated, too, with
Apsaras, with very strangely nimbused gods,
with groups of monsters. In the sky, which
is now changing and turning to the grey of
twilight, they continue to glow for some
seconds longer, looking like metal reddened
by fire, like the burning towers of I know
not what magic palace.
Formerly in place of this sea of verdure,
silent at my feet, the town of Angkor-Thorn
(Angkor the Great) spread for some distance
about the plain ; and if we could now lop
off the tufted branches we should see again,
reappearing below, walls and terraces and
temples ; we should see, stretching away,
long paved avenues bordered by how many
divinities, seven-headed serpents, bell-turrets,
balusters, all foundered now in the bush. But
109
Siam
the deep forest has become again what it was
from the beginning of the ages, for centuries
beyond our power to calculate ; there is now
no outward sign of the work of those Hindoo
adventurers, who, some three hundred years before
our era, came and plied their axes here, clearing
space for a town of nearly a million souls.
No ; it lasted for but fifteen hundred years,
this episode of the Empire of the Khmers,
for what might be called a mere negligible
period, in comparison with the longevity of
the reign of the vegetable world ; and it is
done with, the wound is healed, no trace of
it remains. The fig-tree of ruins flaunts
everywhere its dome of green leaves.
In our days, it is true, some new adventurers,
come from a country nearer west (the country
of France), are chafing in a small way the
eternal forest, for they have founded not far
from here a semblance of a little empire. But
this latest episode will lack magnitude, and
more especially it will lack duration. Soon,
when these pale conquerors shall have left in
turn, buried in this Indo-Chinese soil, many
of their alas, many poor young soldiers all
guiltless of the mad adventure they will pack
their belongings and depart. Then there will
110
A COLONNADE, ANGKOR-VAT
Siam
be seen no more wandering in these regions,
as I am wandering, men of the white race,
who are so foolishly covetous of governing
immemorial Asia, and of disturbing everything
they find there.
The two fantastic, and, as they seemed,
incandescent towers, which I was watching
from this window, cool with singular rapidity
cool from their base, no doubt because the
base is buried in the temple, which in turn
is buried in the damp medley of trees. The
red glow persists now only on the extreme
point, and, as I watch, it changes quickly to
violet and fades away.
The light of the immense panorama dies
like the light of a lamp that is blown out, and
the forest is filled with darkness beneath an
ash- coloured sky, in which lingering green and
yellow lights alone indicate the side where the
sun has set. The Buddhas around me begin
to cause me uneasiness. I imagine that they
are playfully raising their shoulders under the
thick brown mantles, which deform them so
that they look like stout old dowagers swathed
in fur.
The ruins are wrapt in a sudden majesty, and
my continued presence seems a profanation.
Ill
Siam
And then a nameless horror issues from the
darker recesses, where the befurred giants and
hunch - backed dwarfs assume all at once the
air of phantoms. It issues slowly, this
insidious horror, trailing along the gallery like
a sleepy wave towards the window where I
was standing. I realise that it will fill the
temple and that I cannot hope to escape it.
It behoves me to depart, therefore, to descend
in order that I may not be surprised by the
darkness in the middle of the staircases, with
their slippery steps overgrown with creepers.
And, above my head, I can hear the little
rat-like cries answering one another along the
ceilings of resonant stone. It is the hour when
all the hairless wings are about to unfold for
the giddy dance about the old sanctuary, to
resume the general whirl of every night, the
great hunt, the great massacre of gnats and
moths.
112
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER IX
Saturday, 30th November 1901.
THERE has been another deluge during the
night lasting from two o'clock to four, and,
although the thatched roof has protected us
faithfully enough, the air is so impregnated
with moisture that we awake soaked as by the
storm itself.
Now, however, the day is broadening in a
pure splendour. The blue, cloudless sky is
innocence itself. I therefore have the oxen
harnessed to our little jogging carts, in
order to return to the forest and visit that
temple of Bayon, of which I had but a glimpse,
the day before yesterday, in the rainy twilight.
The sun has not long risen when we leave
the enclosed park and plunge at a trot beneath
the tall trees of the deep forest. At once a
green shade stretches over our heads and
around us rises a multitudinous music of birds
and insects delirious in the rapture of the
115
Siam
morning. Along the pathway, above the
impenetrable thickets full of ferns, cycads
and orchids, the trees rise to a prodigious
height. Amongst them are some that have
been scarred by men so rare and stealthy as
they are in these parts who have notched
them in order to collect, in earthen pots, I
know not what precious essence. In the
same manner one may see, in our country,
the inhabitants of the Landes collect the resin
of their pines. There are others of which the
trunk, for about six feet above the ground, is
all scratched, all furrowed with cruel rents.
These are the trees used by the tigers, as
obsessed in this respect as cats, to stretch
their paws and sharpen their merciless claws,
when they awaken in the evening after the
long siesta of the day.
It is already becoming insufferably hot, with
a moist unwholesome heat saturated with
exhalations of the lush earth and wanton
plants. In the rays of the sun which, here
and there, traverse the foliage, we can see the
insects in their endless whirligigs, and their
little metallic - lustred bodies seem to throw
off sparks of fire. The mosquitoes, those tiny
carriers of fever, eddy everywhere in clouds of
116
Siam
fine dust. Butterflies with bodies that are
too light for their long silken wings, drift as
they fly, seeming the plaything of the slightest
breath, until they settle at last upon some
singular pale-coloured flower of the shade. And
the numberless birds which fly before us might
be blue and red rockets thrown up in our
passage through the semi-obscurity of the forest.
At the end of nearly an hour the crenellated
wall of the tenebrous town of Angkor-Thorn
appears before us, without breaking the con-
tinuous vault of trees ; and still in green night
we descend from our ox -carts before the " Gate
of Victory," above which, beneath a fringe of
creepers, smiles a colossal human visage.
Having passed the ramparts, we continue to
advance, but through a denser bush and by
pathways less defined.
Half an hour's walk, about, in this forest
sown with debris, which is the winding sheet
of a town, where every stone bears trace of an
antique sculpture, where the fragments one
picks up in the grass represent a human
mask. And then we reach a shapeless mass of
rocks, a kind of mountain above which the fig-
trees of ruins spread superbly their large green
parasols. And this is Bayon. These rocks
117
Siam
were builded long ago by the hand of man ;
they are factitious ; they are the remains of one
of the most prodigious temples of the world.
The destruction is bewildering. How could
they come, these masses of stone, to warp thus,
to bend, to fall, to be confounded in such
chaos? There are towers which seem to have
fallen in a single piece, to have descended in
their entirety from their basements. And the
massive terraces have broken. And all around
the earth has mounted; the humus, in the
course of centuries, has begun to climb the
large staircases in its endeavour to swallow
up the whole.
The immense faces of Brahma, " the gracious
old ladies," so sly-looking and so little reassuring
the other evening in the twilight, I see them
again everywhere above my head, smiling upon
me from between the ferns and roots. They
are far more numerous than I thought. I can
discern them even on the most distant of the
towers, crowned and girt about the neck with
necklaces. But in broad day, how they have
lost their power to scare ! They seem to say
to me this morning : " We are quite dead, you
see, and quite harmless. It is not out of irony
we smile thus, with eyelids half - closed ; it is
118
BAYON
Siam
because we have attained peace peace without
dreams."
The temple, of which the scarcely recognisable
ruins are before me, represents the earliest con-
ception, crude and savagely immense, of a people
apart, without analogue in the world, and with-
out neighbours : the Khmer people, a detached
branch of the great Aryan race, which planted
itself here as if by chance, and grew and
developed far from the parent stem, separated
from the rest of the world by immense expanses
of forest and marshland. About the ninth
century some four hundred years earlier than
Angkor - Vat, this sanctuary, ruder and more
enormous, was in the plenitude of its glory.
In order to try and picture to one's self what
was once its almost awful magnificence, it
would be necessary, first of all, to clear away,
in imagination, the forest which engulfs it, to
suppress the inextricable entanglement of these
roots and these greenish white-spotted branches,
which are, so to say, the tentacles of the fig-tree
of ruins ; and then, no longer in this eternal
green night, but in the open air, under the
wide heaven, to re-erect these quadruple- visaged
towers about fifty towers ! to replace them
upright on their monstrous pedestal, which like
119
Siam
that of Angkor- Vat was in three stages. To
imagine, afterwards, all around, a wide extent
of open space so that men might see from
afar the crushing stature of the whole ; to
re-construct the successive terraces, the steps,
the sumptuous avenues which led hither, bordered
by so many columns, balusters, divinities, and
monsters, which to-day are foundered in the
herbage.
These towers with their squat forms and
superposed rows of crowns, might have been
compared in outline to colossal pineapples
placed on end. It was as if a vegetation of
stone had sprouted in thick impetuous profusion
from the soil ; fifty towers of different heights
rising in tiers ; fifty fantastic pineapples, grouped
in a kind of bundle on a base as large as a
town, almost hugging one another and form-
ing a retinue to a central and more gigantic
tower, some two hundred feet in height, which
dominated them, its summit crowned with a
golden lotus-flower. And from high in the air,
those quadruple faces with which each of them
was adorned gazed at the four cardinal points,
gazed everywhere, with the same drooping eye-
lids, the same expression of ironical pity, the
same srnile. They affirmed, they repeated until
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Siam
it became a kind of obsession, the omnipresence
of the god of Angkor. From whatever point
of the immense town these aerial faces were
always to be seen, some full - face, others
in profile or three - quarter face, now gloomy
under lowering rain-charged skies, now ardent,
as with ruddy fire, at the setting of the sun,
or, again, bluish and spectral on moonlit nights,
but always there and always commanding. But
to-day their reign is over ; in the green twilight
in which they are crumbling it is necessary,
almost, to seek to find them, and the time is
approaching when they will no longer be even
recognisable.
To ornament the walls of Bayon, endless bas-
reliefs and decorations of every sort have been
conceived with an exuberant prodigality. Here,
too, there are battles, furious conflicts, war-
chariots, interminable processions of elephants,
and groups of Apsaras, of Tevadas with pompous
crowns. But under the moss everything is
becoming effaced and perishing. The workman-
ship is cruder and more naive than at Angkor-
Vat, but the inspiration revealed here is more
vehement, more tumultuous. There is some-
thing disconcerting in so great a profusion. In
our days of pinchbeck versatility it is difficult
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Siam
to realise the perseverance, the fertility, the faith,
the love of the grand and eternal, which inspired
this vanished people.
Beneath the central tower with its golden
lotus, some sixty feet above the plain, was
concealed the Holy of Holies, a dark retreat,
stifling as a casemate in its thickness of stone.
It was approached from many sides, by a
veritable maze of converging galleries, as mourn-
ful as sepulchral chambers. But access to it
to-day is difficult and dangerous, the approaches
are so broken and ruinous. You feel that you
are still beneath the forest for the forest covers
even the towers beneath a multiple net-work
of innumerable roots. It is very dark. A luke-
warm water oozes from all the walls, on phantom
gods without arms or without a head. You
can hear the gliding of snakes, the flight of
unascertained creeping beasts ; and the bats
awake, flicking you, by way of protest, with
their rapidly moving wings which you have not
seen coming. In Brahmanistic times this Holy
of Holies was a place where men were wont
to tremble, and centuries of neglect have not
robbed it of its awe. It remains always the
refuge of the ancient mysteries. The noises
made by the furtive beasts as we entered cease
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A DOORWAY, BAYON
Siam
as soon as we become still, and everything
subsides at once into an intense silence, filled
with I know not what horror of expectancy.
In this forest of shadow are to be found a
number of other ruins, in disjointed and over-
thrown masses, beneath the beautiful, triumphant
branches ; debris of palaces, of temples, of
piscinae where men and elephants used to bathe.
They bear witness still to the splendour of that
empire of the Khmers, which flourished for
fifteen hundred years unknown to Europe,
and then perished after a swift decline, ex-
hausted by a succession of wars with Siam,
with Annam, and even with immemorial and
and stagnant China.
To my western eyes, the final impression
received from these dead things is one of baffle-
ment and mystery. The least stone, the least
lintel over a portico, the least of these crownings
imitating flames, is a cause of astonishment,
like the revelation of a distant and hostile world.
Monsters in greenish stone, seated in the
attitude of dogs, and coifed in a fashion, doubt-
less, of some planet without communication
with ours, welcome me with looks of startling
strangeness, with rictus never previously seen,
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Siam
even in the old Chinese sanctuaries from which
I come. " We do not know thee," they say to
me. " We are conceptions for ever foreign to
thee. What comest thou hither to do?
Begone." And, moreover, as the sun ascends
and blazes more fiercely above the vault of
trees, an increasing heaviness retards our steps ;
as we walk we are more and more closely en-
veloped by a kind of aggressive dust, dancing
and sparkling, which is a cloud of mosquitoes ;
and it is with a lassitude a little feverish that
we continue to wander in this forest of dark
enchantments. Enough ! It is time to retrace
our steps towards the " Gate of Victory," in
order to return before midday to the enclosure
of Angkor- Vat.
The burning hour is near when we again
reach the shelter of the hangar of the pilgrims,
where is heard from morning till evening, like
an incantation, the psalmody of the yellow-
robed monks.
And, after the mid-day repast, the irresistible
tropical languor returns, as it returns every day,
to prostrate us. It will be better to leave this
hangar in which one stifles, and, braving the
scorching of the sun, to cross the ten yards or so
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Siam
which separate me from the first galleries of the
temple. In the shadow and perpetual damp-
ness of the stone ceilings 1 may find at least
an appearance of coolness. Let some one spread
a mat there for me, after sweeping clear a space
at a point where the vault is not too tapestried
with bats, and I will sleep on the comparatively
cool flagstones, covering my face with a fan
as a protection from what may fall from the
roof.
But, nevertheless, sleep is slow in coming to
me, for I am lying at the very foot of the
immense bas-relief of battles, and, spite of me,
my heavy eyes are beguiled by it for a long
time : silent torment ; fury of great conflicts
past and forgotten, slaughters sung by the poets
of the Ramayana, but which no one any
more remembers; confusion of muscular limbs,
meeting in shock of battle between the army
of the Giants and that of the King of the
Monkeys, war-chariots crushing the wounded
in hundreds. ... In the prevailing gloom, all
this, blackish and, as it were, varnished by the
damp, is illumined in places by a glimmering
half-light, and thus the reliefs are accentuated, a
little life returns to the effaced rictus, to the
dead contortions. I have lost the notion of the
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Siam
enormity of the neighbouring mass of architec-
ture, but I feel that I have become intimate with
those of the warriors, men and women, who
struggle near me, almost touching my head. . . .
Quite near an Apsara smiles upon me from
the melee. Hers is the last image of which
I am conscious. For some seconds longer I see
her fair breast gleaming, looking moist as if it
were beaded with a warm sweat, . . . and then,
no more; I lapse into unconsciousness.
I have been asleep for an hour, perhaps, when
one of my Siamese servants brings me the
cards of three visitors. The names are French.
Yes, by all means show them in even here,
into my splendid reception hall. But truly,
it is the last thing I should have expected :
to receive visitors at Angkor.
Three Frenchmen in fact. They have been
sent to Siam in pursuance of archaeological
studies, and since yesterday have been installed,
not far from me, beneath a roof of thatch in
the holy enclosure. They are learned and
agreeable. Besides, after days of solitude and
silence, travelling without companions, it is
a relief to exchange thoughts with men of
France.
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AN APSARA
Siam
I ought to remain, they tell me, for the
forest is full of unknown ruins. Over and above
the great temples which every one visits, there
are to be found scattered about, by the side of
the rivers and swamps, a number of monuments
in terra cotta of an art most singular, dating
back to the fourth century, and even to the
earliest days of the Khmer Empire.
But no; I will adhere to my intention of
leaving to-day in the decline of the sun. First,
there are the elephants of the good King
Norodom which I am due to meet the day after
to-morrow at Kompong-Luong. And then, and
more especially, how should I forget that I am,
in fact, no more than a modest aide-de-camp,
whose leave is limited, and must report myself,
within the stipulated time, on board the war-
ship which awaits me at Saigon?
I have given the order to prepare our de-
parture for five o'clock ; and, while the ox-carts
are being got ready and my kit is being packed,
I mount the steps of the temple for the last
time.
No rain has fallen since last night to refresh
the suspended plants, or moisten the heaps of
stones, and an intolerable heat, as of glowing
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Siam
coal, now emanates from the terraces, the walls
and statuary, on which the sun has been blazing
all day long. But the divine Apsaras, who
have been used for centuries to be thus burnt
with rays, smile at me by way of adieu, with-
out losing their ease or customary gracious
irony. As I took leave of them I little thought
that within a few hours, by the lavish caprice
of the King of Pnom-Penh, I should see them
again, one night, at the evocation of the sound
of the old music of their times, see them no
longer dead, with these fixed smiles of stone,
but in the fulness of life and youth, no longer
with these breasts of rigid sandstone, but with
palpitating breasts of flesh, and coifed in verit-
able tiaras of gold, and sparkling with veritable
jewels. . . .
The sun is already low in the heavens and
beginning to cast a ruddy light when my
little train of ox-carts gets under way, leaving
Angkor behind for ever, along the paved cause-
way, between the bushes clustered with the
white bloom of the fragrant jasmine. Beyond
the large pools choked with weeds and water-
lilies, beyond the bridge, the last porticoes and
the great seven-headed serpents which guard the
128
Siam
threshold, the pathway of departure opens before
us. It plunges under the trees which are ready
at once to hide the great temple from us.
I turn, therefore, to take a last look at Angkor.
This pilgrimage, which, since my childhood, I
had hoped to make, is now a thing accomplished,
fallen into the past, as soon will fall my own
brief human existence, and I shall never see
again, rising into the sky, those great strange
towers. I cannot even, this last time, follow
them for long with my eyes, for very quickly
the forest closes round us, ushering in a sudden
twilight.
At about seven or eight o'clock we reach
the Siamese village of Siem-Reap, on the bank
of the river, in the region of the tall palms. It
is quite dark, and the half-naked folk who move
about under the vault of trees get the light
they need by waving burning brands, as is
the custom also in India on the Malabar coast.
They hasten to welcome us and instal us, on
the river bank, in a hut used by the travelling
pilgrims, which seems to be on stilts, so high
are the piles on which it is raised.
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CHAPTER X
CHAPTER X
Sunday, 1st December 1901.
AN hour more in our ox -carts, along the
bank of the little river, in the freshness of
the early morning, passing through Eden-like
villages, amongst palms and garlands of blossom-
ing creepers.
At a point on the bank the sampan which
brought us hither is awaiting us the large
sampan, the roof of which is in the form of
a coffin lid. Then, leaving our carts, we
begin to descend the narrow river, brushed by
reeds, by grasses of gigantic size. First of all,
swamps gradually getting more and more inun-
dated, and then the submerged forest, which,
as it envelops us in its poisonous shadow,
takes away the little respirable air there was.
An hour and a half is spent in traversing the
gloomy labyrinth, rowing between enormous
half - submerged trees, amongst branches en-
tangled with creepers. It is not till about
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Siam
mid-day that we escape from the oppression
of the forest and that the great lake, opening
at last ahead of us, unrolls before our eyes,
which are dazzled at the sight, its wide expanse
as of a sea of gleaming tin.
The steamboat, which is to take us back to
Cambodia, is there, moored to the branches of
this semblance of a shore, looking as if it were
lost in the midst of this desert of verdure and
warm water. Let us get up steam and depart
as soon as possible.
All the afternoon, all the evening, is spent
in gliding, with rapid and monotonous motion,
over this lake which to-day has no visible
limits, to such a degree does the evaporated
moisture blot out the horizon. The sun seems
to vaporise it, to drink it a sun that, all im-
bued with moisture as it is, itself looks troubled,
though, nevertheless, sinister and terrible. Not
a breath anywhere, and a mortal electric tension.
Our steamboat makes little ridges on the mourn-
ful water, ridges always alike, which disappear
in silence in ever-lessening ripples. We seem
to be sailing on some mysterious molten metal,
too sluggish or too heavy for such noise as
ordinary water makes ; and thus the companies
134
Siam
of pelicans we rock in our passage, asleep in
long bands of pinkish-white, are scarcely dis-
turbed by our approach. Everywhere, somno-
lence and torpor under a light at once excessive
and diffuse. From time to time there are
enacted before us phantasmagorias that seem
designed to scare us : they appear always in
the direction of the west. We see sombre
things rising in the distance, almost as quickly
as the dense smoke of volcanoes. They darken
a whole side of the sky; they take on shades
of copper ; they assume the appearance of
toppling rocks, of mountains about to tumble
into chaos : rough shapings of storms which do
not break, but are transformed at once, dis-
solving and vanishing like the visions of
dreams.
Not a boat in sight, not a canoe: we are
alone upon this shoreless sea. Through all
these insubstantialities of air and water, without
any kind of landmark, our pilot a Siamese
guides himself by instinct, no doubt, in the same
way as the migrating birds. In the twilight,
however, when he is endeavouring to find the
entrance to the river down which our further
course lies, he is perplexed, he hesitates and
changes his route. There is no danger,
135
Siam
however, only the risk of being detained here
till daybreak.
And now night falls, moist and languorous,
and we scarcely know where we are. The
water has not always clear contours. Dark
masses, which are really storm clouds, resemble
in places adjacent banks. We see rising
phantoms of mountains, phantoms of forests.
Pale stars, bedimmed as was the sun, appear
at last through the mist to guide us. Our
pilot thinks he has found his bearings, and we
continue on our way at full speed. A violent
shock ! The boat rears and stops, while at the
same time the air is rent with the sound of
breaking branches. A mass of shadow, which
he had taken for one of the deceptive clouds,
proves to be really the bank ; we have plunged
into it, our bows sheer amongst the trees, and
from the concussion a thousand little beasts,
which were asleep in the verdure, descend like
a rain upon us, locusts, beetles, lizards, and
venomous little snakes. The engines are
reversed, and we extricate ourselves without
having suffered damage. We had struck only
soft mud and fragile mangroves. And our
Siamese, it appears, had missed the entrance
to the river by only a few yards, so that
136
Siam
soon we find it, and, sure of our way,
proceed with speed accelerated now by the
current. It is the Mekong at last, and we
prepare to sleep, satisfied that all is for the
best.
137
CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XI
Monday, 2nd December 1901.
AT about three o'clock this morning, under a
deluge in which all the clouds of yesterday
were emptying themselves, we had come to
a mooring amongst the reeds of the great
river, near the village of Kompong-Luong.
It is here that the river brings me nearest to a
certain temple dedicated to the manes of the
queen-mother of Cambodia, to which I intend,
in passing, to make a pilgrimage. It lies some
distance away in the dense bush.
Now, at daybreak, I am awakened by
formidable footsteps, which make the adjacent
bank tremble, and are accompanied by a music
of breaking branches. Through a porthole,
open near my head, I look to see what
ponderous visitors attend me. The just dawn-
ing day reveals to me a medley of reeds and
moistened bushes, which already seem too
vividly green for so dim a light, just as the
141
Siam
sun, too, seems too red. And in this
setting of the early morning colossal beasts
appear, gambolling in clumsy playfulness, and
shaking the earth. It might be some scene
of the earliest ages of the world. These
elephants for elephants they are are doubtless
the four promised by King Norodom, and they
are corne punctually to the rendezvous. Four
men, clothed in white, follow them, talking
to them with a sort of quiet patience, and at
an order given almost in a whisper, they
become motionless right opposite to me.
When the good elephants are saddled, having
each on its nape a squatting driver, and on
its back a palanquin like a Cambodian cabin,
I am invited to take my place, with my
interpreter and my two servants. We set off
in line, each of us in his little oscillating hut.
We have to go, first of all, through the village.
Then the market, where a world of little yellow
folk is busy at its bargaining, buying and
selling fruits, grains, chickens, and strange-
looking fish from the Mekong. Our elephants,
aware of the fear they are about to cause,
walk here with only short, quiet steps, but, as
invariably happens, all the oxen, all the
buffaloes flee before the sovereign beast, and
142
Siam
some mannikins are knocked over, some bowls
of milk upset there are cries, tumult.
After this isolated grouping of humanity, we
plunge for two or three hours into the dense
bush, and meet not a soul on our way. There
is no forest of shadows here as in Siam, but
simply bush, that Indo - Chinese bush, inex-
tricable, always the same, useless and endless.
We follow narrow pathways, on a soil of the
red of bloodstone, between two curtains of
bushes of most brilliant green. Foliage which
is strange to us imprisons us more and more
in its multitudinous compactness : a whole
vegetation eternally watered, eternally over-
heated, which yet does not succeed in attaining
any height of growth, but remains dwarfish and
soft and of an unhealthy exuberance. From
the vantage of our palanquins we see from time
to time unlimited expanses of this mournful
verdure, which tells of exile and savours of
fever.
In the foreground, in front of me, always the
bronze neck of the elephant- driver, and now
and then, two enormous grey ears which rise
and beat the air like fans. One has a sense
of princely well-being in the little rocking cabin,
sheltered from the sun of fire, travelling in this
143
Siam
sure and solid fashion, with a step that never
stumbles, and a smoothness that no obstacle
will have the force to disturb. And yet in time
the heart begins to sicken a little at the
monotony of this bush which closes behind
you in silence, ceaselessly, mercilessly, as the
minutes pass.
We make our mid-day halt at an old monastery
at the foot of a little mountain, which serves
as a pedestal to the mausoleum of the Cambodian
kings. Here there is some running water and
trees that are really tall, and we seem to have hit
upon a little corner of paradise in the midst of this
desert of noxious verdure. A vast hall of reddish-
coloured wood, with a fantastic roof, having by
way of walls little more than reed blinds, and
by way of decoration huge Buddhist pictures
on rice paper, which are suspended from the
pillars. We instal ourselves there on mats,
welcomed, with fitting dignity, by two or three
venerable monks, and a very aged woman, with
white close-cropped hair, whose face of parch-
ment bears the impress of a hundred years. Our
elephants have been let loose in the bush, where
they will eat for their dinner a few young trees.
Treading on tip -toe, the venerable old lady
144
Siam
in her religious garb of yellow brings us square-
shaped cushions on which to recline or lay our
head. She says nothing, and her features, trans-
fixed by so many years of a mysticism un-
intelligible to our souls, do not move. After
the mid- day repast we fall asleep, stretched on
our mats, in a peculiar kind of monachal peace,
broken only by the sound of the neighbouring
stream, which gives an illusion of coolness.
About half-past three comes the awakening,
for my attendants as well as for myself, and I
order the elephants to be brought back, for it
is the hour to resume our journey.
This mountain which overhangs the monastery
is one of those geological fantasies which are
scattered here and there in the midst of the
low -lying plains of Cambodia: one of those
abrupt, isolated, unexpected cones which are
known here as pnom. They one nearly all
deemed holy, and serve as a base to a place
of prayer. This particular one, already very
pointed in itself, is made more so by the
mausoleum which caps it and is more pointed,
more slender than any of our cathedral spires.
And it is there, high above the jungle infested
with tigers and monkeys, which surrounds it,
as near as possible to the storm-filled sky, that
145 K
Siam
the old kings of Cambodia sleep. The ashes
of the queen-mother have been deposited there
recently after a cremation attended with im-
memorial rites, with a ceremonial of dance and
music dating back beyond all doubt to the
days of Angkor.
It is about an hour's journey from the
monastery to the pagoda consecrated to the
manes of this old princess, which is the goal of
my pilgrimage. The sun is getting low when
we perceive it, in a kind of glade in the midst
of the bush. Amongst tall, slender palm-trees,
the green plumes of which dominate the sur-
rounding jungle, it appears before us all illumi-
nated by the Bengal lights of the setting sun, its
tarnished gildings gleaming softly like some
precious piece of antique jewellery. Its image
is reflected in a solitary pool strewn with eyots
of pink lotus. It is ornamented, needless to say,
with long, golden horns, which part in all
directions from the roof; and it stands on a
triple-staged pedestal, on the ledges of which
monsters, in attitudes of mockery, are consumed
with laughter, with the horrible laughter of a
death's head. Hearing our elephants approach-
ing, some of the monks, robed in lemon-yellow
arid draped in orange-yellow, open the doors
146
Siam
and stand in staged groups on the steps of
the threshold. It is truly a perfect vision of
the old ages of Asia that was awaiting us in
the silence of this remote spot and in the red
glow of evening.
I am advised by my interpreter that it would
be more discreet on my part, and more correct,
not to ask the monks, who would not venture
to refuse me, for permission to visit the interior
of the pagoda. Without descending from my
palanquin, I confine myself, therefore, to the
slow circuit of its base.
It is the art of Angkor that one finds again
here, greatly reduced, of course, from its colossal
proportions, and a little too affected, perhaps, too
mannered, but yet of a most exquisite strange-
ness. At Angkor the enormous walls were
covered with embroideries of stone. Here,
beneath the fantastic roof with its great
golden horns, the pagoda seems to be hung
with a sumptuous old brocade, which scintillates
in the dying rays of the sun it is a veritable
network of minute carvings in gilded stucco,
in which are mingled particles of crystal imitat-
ing rubies and emeralds. And the doors, which
shine with a different and bluish lustre, are
in mosaic of mother-of-pearl.
147
Siam
Our elephants, as if they realised that we
wished to view the pagoda without haste, make
the circuit of the terraces with a somnolent
majesty. One after another, each of the statues,
placed on the ledges of the pedestal, presents
to us, as we pass, its grimace of irony. They
have the bodies of men, but the faces of scare-
crows ; they represent the guardian spirits of
the eternal thresholds ; and their presence suffices
to mark a place of funeral and to command
reflection. Standing there, with legs apart and
hands resting on their bent knees, they look as
if they stooped thus in a convulsion of laughter
laughing at the transiency of human things,
no doubt, laughing at birth and laughing at
death. As in the case of the walls of the
pagoda, the monsters which guard it are covered
with gilded carvings and facets of crystal, which
make for them costumes of great pomp and
show, a little faded, it is true, and spotted with
grey mouldiness. As for their faces, they are
already familiar to us ; they have been copied
from the thousand-year-old bas-reliefs of Angkor.
But why these convulsed attitudes of uncanny
laughter in this place of final and abiding peace ?
To us what an abysm of mystery there is in
such a conception of tombs I
148
Siam
When we have completed the circuit of the
pagoda, and return once more before the doors
of mother-of-pearl, it is only the gold of the
roof, its somewhat Chinese curves and its long
horns which shine with a bright effulgence.
The sun has buried itself in the endless verdure
of the plains. It no longer illumines the walls,
and we see these old brocades, already faded
by the rains of many seasons, dimmed with
subtle shadings, and dappled, in places only, by
a kind of embroidery of crystal. The monks
to do us honour have remained standing on
the steps. And the whole picture the pagoda,
these motionless people in yellow robes, the
funereal spirits laughing on the ledges of the
terraces, with hands resting on their outspread
knees is reflected in the dead waters of
the pond, where the lotus, flowers of broad
day, are beginning to close and seal their
pink petals because the shadows of evening
are falling. And upon these superannuated
splendours there seems to descend more and
more, as the twilight deepens, the peace of pro-
found isolation.
It is the hour of departure, and the pace of
our elephants quickens for the return journey.
We plunge again into the narrow pathways,
149
Siam
where we are encompassed and brushed con-
tinually by the verdure. Once more the bush
closes behind us, the eternal bush, hastening
to hide from us the magic glade, which,
perhaps, is haunted occasionally still by the
incomprehensible soul of a queen of furthest
Asia.
Dark night when the good giant beasts kneel
down to deposit us at the village of the morning,
near the bank of the river. The boat is await-
ing us there under steam, and I prepare at once
to continue the journey down the Mekong. It
is the time of the year when the waters of the
lakes of Siam are emptied into the great river,
and we set out with all the speed of our engines
added to the swiftness of the current. Soon
after midnight we have reached Pnom-Penh,
and are moored before the gardens of the
Governor.
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CHAPTER XII
CHAPTER XII
Tuesday, 3rd December 1901.
AT Pnom - Penh until the midnight follow -
ing, after which it will be necessary to fall
back upon Saigon, so as to report myself on
board at the expiration of my leave. A warm,
torrential rain the whole day long.
This evening at nine o'clock old King Norodom
is to receive me. And the Governor, having had
the great kindness to intimate to him that I
was not an ordinary aide-de-camp, but a lettre
de France, it appears that there is to be a
grand reception in which the corps de ballet of
the court will figure.
The rain is still falling in a deluge when the
Governor's carriage comes to take me to the
palace. The night is suffocating, in spite of
the tropical downpour which descends upon us
from the black sky. Our way lies under con-
fused trees, along dark avenues where nothing
seems to be alive. But a blaze of light greets
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Siam
us on arrival, and attendants, carrying large
Asiatic umbrellas, hurry forward to assist us in
alighting, and to shelter us in our passage to
the reception hall.
It is immense, this hall, but it has no walls,
nothing but a roof upheld in the air by very
tall blue pillars. In the girandoles and on the
silver Cambodian torches where not long ago
burnt only wicks soaked in oil electric light
has recently been installed. It is a little dis-
concerting here, and splashes with brutality the
crowd of princesses, ladies-in-waiting, attendants,
musicians, some five or six hundred people in
all, who are seated on mats on the floor. All
the costumes are white and all the draperies,
and there is a multitude of bare arms and bare
bosoms of the colour of pale bronze. The
orchestra, as soon as we appear, begins a music
of Asia, which straightaway transports us into
far distances of space and time. It is slow and
loud, rendered by some thirty instruments of
metal or resonant wood, which are struck with
velvet-topped batons. There are dulcimers,
wooden harmonicas with a very extended key-
board, and peals of little gongs which vibrate
in the manner of pianos played with the loud
pedal. The melody is infinitely sad, but the
154
Siam
rhythm gets more and more rapid until it
reaches a kind of frenzy, like the rhythm
of a tarantella.
We are escorted to a platform and bidden
seat ourselves near the golden-mattressed couch
on which presently the old, infirm, and almost
dying king will come to lie. Near us, on a
gilt table, are cups of champagne, and boxes,
made of the reddish gold of Cambodia, filled
with cigarettes. We command the hall, of
which the centre, carpeted with white mats
and large enough for the manoeuvring of a
battalion, is empty. It is there that the
spectacle of the ballet will be presented to us.
Very large Chinese vases, containing drenched
foliage variegated like flowers, are placed at the
foot of each of the pillars. Between the pillars,
above the white- clothed crowd, are revealed the
black of the rainy night, the darkness of the
profound sky ; and, above all, the rain which is
now descending in torrents more furious than
ever. The smallest drops, in passing into the
vivid electric light, sparkle with prismatic lights,
sparkle so that one seems to see precious stones
falling in thousands, diamonds in cascades. Two
doors at the further end open into the interior
of the palace, and it is from these that the
155
Siam
ballerinas will appear. The heat remains over-
powering, in spite of the large fans which are
waved unceasingly above our heads by the
attendants. And everywhere flights of insects,
maddened by the brilliance of the girandoles,
whirl innumerable; mosquitoes, day-flies, hum-
ming beetles, and large moths.
The king is long in coming, and presently
attendants bring his crown and sceptre of
gold, set with large rubies and emeralds, and
place them on a cushion near us. He is after
all too ill to appear ; l he begs that we will
excuse him, and send us these attributes of
sovereignty to intimate to us that the reception
is, nevertheless, a royal one.
The spectacle, then, will begin without him.
The music suddenly becomes quieter and
more mysterious, as if it were announcing
something supernatural. One of the doors
at the back opens ; an adorable and almost
fantastic little creature springs into the middle
of the hall an Apsara of the temple of Angkor !
It would be impossible to imagine an illusion
1 Ho died a short time afterwards. And it is his successor,
King Sisovath, who visited France,, and committed the amiable
fault of showing to the Parisians some of the ballerinas of his
court. One ought not to profane and diminish such spectacles by
producing them in this way out of their proper frame.
156
DANCING GIRLS
Siam
more perfect. She has the same features
because she is of the same unmingled blood,
the same enigmatic smile, the eyes downcast,
almost closed, the same breast of budding
womanhood, scarcely veiled by a thin network
of silk. And her costume is scrupulously copied
from the old bas-reliefs, but copied in real
jewels, in gorgeous fabrics ; kinds of sheathes
of gold brocade imprison her legs and loins.
Her face whitened with fard, her eyes artificially
elongated, she wears a very high tiara of gold,
studded with rubies, which tapers to a point
like the roof of a pagoda, and on either shoulder
a kind of pinion, like a dolphin's fin, in gold
and precious stones. Of gold likewise, set with
precious stones, are the broad waistband, the
rings which ornament her ankles and her bare
arms of amber-colour faintly flushed with pink.
Alone at first upon the scene, this little
Apsara of remote ages, escaped from the sacred
bas-relief, makes signs of appeal in the direction
of the door of the background which has
become for us the door of fairy-like ^apparitions
and two of her sisters run out to join her, two
new Apsaras, likewise sparkling, their hips
moulded in the same rigid sheathes, wearing
the same golden crowns and the same golden
157
Siam
pinions. All three join hands. They are the
queens of the Apsaras, doubtless, for a throne
has been prepared for them. But they exchange
a mimicry of anxiety, and begin again to make
signs of appeal, always in the direction of that
same door. . . . We have already marvelled at
seeing three. Can it be that there are others
still to come ? And now they appear in groups,
ten, twenty, thirty, decked like goddesses as
were the first, wearing on their charming heads
and shoulders all the treasure of Cambodia.
Before the three enthroned queens, they
proceed to perform their ritual dances, which
involve little or no change of place, but consist
rather in rhythmic movements or quiverings of
the whole body. They undulate like snakes,
these slender little creatures, their exquisitely
muscular bodies seeming to be without bone.
At times they spread out their arms in the
form of a cross, and then the serpentine undula-
tion begins in the fingers of the right hand,
flows through the wrist, the fore arm, the elbow,
the shoulder, crosses the breast, and continues on
the opposite side, following the other arm until
it dies at last on the tips of the fingers of the
left hand, overloaded with rings.
In real life these exquisite little ballerinas
158
Siam
are very jealously guarded, are often indeed
princesses of the royal blood, whom no one
has the right either to approach or gaze upon.
They have been trained from their earliest
years to these movements which do not seem
possible for human limbs ; to these poses which
are so little natural, but are, nevertheless, of
immemorial tradition in this country, as is
proved by the stone personages who inhabit
the ruins.
They are going to mime now some scenes
from the Ramayana, such as formerly were
carved in hard sandstone, in the bas - reliefs
of the ancestral temple. The handsome war-
chariots, copied in little from those of Angkor,
make their entry. But, by a naive convention,
the elephants which should be drawing them
have been replaced by men, walking on all
fours, naked and yellow, masked in huge card-
board heads with moveable trunks and ears.
Then we assist at divers episodes, pleasant
and tragic, at combats between monsters, above
all at the filing past of processions in celebra-
tion of victories. We see a little queen, of
fourteen or fifteen years, very much bejewelled,
very much painted, ideal in her war-chariot,
pursued by the declarations of love of a young
159
Siam
warrior, and repulsing them with a grace
infinitely chaste. We see a thousand subtle
and charming things which testify to an art
of the most refined kind. Whenever a train
of Apsaras retires by one of the doors of the
background, another train enters from another
door and proceeds slowly to occupy the hall.
There are some of them, some of these little
fairies all in gold, who can be no more than
seven or eight years old; and they file past,
painted like idols, crowned with very high
tiaras, with jewelled pinions on their shoulders,
grave and dignified in hieratic attitudes.
A heat more and more oppressive is exhaled
from this crowd, which is perfumed with musk
and flowers ; the torrential rain continues to
fill the background of the picture with its
stream of sparkling gems ; from all the neigh-
bouring bush, myriads of little winged beasts
come without ceasing to hurl themselves upon
the lustres and torches ; there come, too, large
bats and nocturnal birds ; the exuberant animal
life, with which the air is filled to excess,
envelops us and penetrates us.
And now enters the " King of the Monkeys, "
grimacing, in his mask of gold just as I have
seen him, needless to say, in the bas-reliefs of
160
Siam
the old temple. He also assumes poses which
are not natural, are not possible (the poses of
the bas-reliefs, always) ; his youthful limbs
have been adapted from very early days to
these exigencies of tradition. In his train the
whole army of monkeys invades the scene :
young girls again, little princesses masked like
scarecrows, but whose rising breasts are out-
lined underneath the flimsy coverings of costly
silks. And the business is, for this astonishing
but little redoubtable cohort to go to the rescue
of fair Sita, whom the demons hold captive,
a very long way off, on an island. . . . We are
in the midst of the Ramayana, and the same
spectacles were once enacted, no doubt, at
Angkor-Thorn, the same costumes were worn
there. This evening I am able to imagine,
better than ever before, what were the splendours
of the old legendary town. Days that we
thought were dead and done for ever come
to life again before our eyes. But it is no
effort of the imagination which thus recon-
stitutes them. The simple truth is that nothing
has changed here, whether in the souls of men
or in the secrets of palaces, since the heroic
ages. In spite of its diminished outward
seeming, this fallen Cambodian people has
161 L
Siam
remained the Khmer people, the people which
astonished the Asia of olden times by its pomp
and mysticism. One knows, too, that it has
never surrendered its hope of reconquering its
great capital, buried for centuries now in the
forests of Siam ; and it is always the Ramayana,
that epic so ancient and so nebulous, which
continues to haunt its imagination and to direct
its dream.
Let us hope that France, the protectress (?) of
this land, may be able to understand that the
ballet of the kings of Pnom-Penh is a sacred
heritage, a marvel of antiquity not to be
destroyed !
At about one o'clock in the morning, in
dark night and under a warm rain, we leave
the palace of Norodom, and I go at once to
have the steamboat, which awaits me, made
ready for departure. I recommence to descend
the current of the Mekong, in deep and
oppressive darkness, and the vision of the little
fairies of the Ramayana vanishes from me.
The day after to-morrow must find me back
at Saigon, that baleful town of languor and
death, to take my place again in attendance on
the admiral, amongst my companions in exile ;
162
Siam
to shut myself up once more within the stifling
iron walls of that warship, which, for nearly
two-and-twenty months, has carried us through
all the swells of the seas of China, but which
sleeps now alongside the unhealthy quay, where
the verdure of the trees is too vividly green,
and the soil of mournful redness.
163
CHAPTER XIII
CHAPTER XIII
October 1910.
NEARLY ten more years have passed since my
pilgrimage. And now the hour has come,
quickly, stealthily, the hour which it seemed to
me should never come, the twilight hour of
life when all earthly things grow distant,
diminish, and are blurred with grey shadows.
After a luminous summer, perhaps the last,
spent in the East, I am back again, since this
morning, in my parental home. It is fine
to-day in this corner of France on which my
eyes opened, fine and calm under a blue sky ;
but the sun, which yet is clear and warm, has
a touch of paleness, which betokens the decline
of the season and adds to the melancholy of
my return.
And here now has chance brought me back
to this little retreat which was the museum
of my childhood a little room of which I
scarcely thought ever again to open the door,
167
Siam
but which I allowed to subsist as a place of
memory. The poor things, which once so filled
my mind with thoughts of distant countries,
are withering and crumbling in their little glass
cases, like mummies neglected in their hypogeum.
There is a faded odour of camphor, of stuffed
birds, an indefinable savour of mortality, and
it is sad here, this evening, unspeakably. I
open the window. . . . But it seems to me
that everything becomes more mournful still
when I let in the rays of the sun of this
October evening. And, see ! a wasp has entered
at the same time. ... I remember how in
the old days many a wasp used to enter thus,
for the little room opens on to the gardens,
on to the old country gardens, the walls of
which are tapestried with vines and rose-
trees.
I think of it suddenly, that out-of-date copy
of a colonial review containing the pictures
which were the first to reveal to me the ruins
of Angkor ! It should still be there, behind
that curtain. How is it that it did not occur
to me to look for it on my return from Asia ?
I try to find it now in this recess, where the
dust lies thick like an impalpable ash.
It was certainly decisive, the influence this
168
Siam
museum exercised in the orientation of my life.
It happens so for the majority of men, simple
playthings as they are of their first impressions ;
trifles long dwelt upon in childhood suffice to
sway, one way or another, the whole sequence
of their destiny ; and this evening is it because
I have not seen it for so many months, my
tiny museum ? this evening its spell still
works. The poor things on its shelves induce
in me almost the hankering and the thrill of
unknown countries, calling me to escape and
come to them. How childish the feeling is!
It is finished, all that ; the unknown exists
no longer, and I have drained the cup of
adventures to the dregs. The gaily-coloured
bird behind this glass once made me dream
of " colonies," but I have wandered in the
most impenetrable of the forests in which it
dwells. That humble calabash, with its barbarous
designs, I used to deem a precious curiosity,
but I have lived amongst the black Yoloffs
who excel in carving them thus, in the shadow
of their reed roofs, before their horizons of
sand. That paddle, hanging on the wall, once
conjured up visions of savage islanders, but the
Polynesians have taught me how to manipulate
identical things, in companionship with them,
169
Siam
in canoes rocked in the swell of the great
ocean. ... Is that, then, all the world is ? Is
human life no more than that?
Ah! I have found the copy of the colonial
review containing the revelation of Angkor.
How imperfect and ill-drawn the pictures seem
on this yellowed paper, compared with the ad-
mirable illustrations we are used to to - day !
Alas, they date back some half-century. They
are very faithful, nevertheless, and show clearly
the tall turrets, in outline like tiaras, which
I have since seen in reality, alike under the
tropical sun and under lowering storm clouds.
And as I gaze upon these unpretentious little
drawings, immediately need I say it? the
impressions of that far off April evening crowd
back into my memory. Even those emphatic
phrases of Ecclesiastes, which then sang them-
selves in my childish head, come back as if
they were of yesterday : "I have tried all
things, I have been everywhere. ... In the
depths of the forests of Siam I have seen
the star of evening rise over the ruins of mys-
terious Angkor. ..."
And to - day ! Yes, it is the day of that
mournful return home of which I had so clear
a presentiment, the last return of all, with
170
Siam
heart aweary and whitening hair. The fact
admits of no disguise ; the day has come, the
cycle of my life is closed.
The wasps continue to invade my little
room, wasps and buzzing flies ; before the little
sealed glass-cases and the little dead things,
they describe their foolish curves. The time
is near, however, when they will go to sleep
or die ; but they, too, have no doubt felt
the influence of tradition, that they come
thus merrily to renew acquaintance with a
place which has so long been closed, where
they used formerly to dance their whirligigs
in my company. The smallest insects, so
they say, repeat eternally the same things in
the same places, just as the tiny mosses and
wild flowerets live and live again for centuries
in the same corner of the wood.
To turn over the leaves of this ancient, out-
of-date review, I have seated myself near the
open window. The late October sun is sinking
over the plain of Aunis which I can see beyond
the neighbouring roofs and the ramparts. On
the limit of the horizon there are still the
same woods, adjoining those of Limoise, and
the line of their configuration has not been
changed. In the distance, amidst the meadows,
171
Siam
the Charente traces its slender, shining track
and formerly this river by which the ships made
their way to foreign countries, to the " colonies,"
represented for me the gateway into the un-
known ; but where would it lead me now, to
what oceans that I have not explored? In
the review resting on my knee, I discover
pictures which I had not noticed or had for-
gotten : here is the great mask of Brahma,
such as it appeared to me one evening in the
forest of shadow, multiplied in startling fashion,
and gazing down upon me from the height of
the quadruple-visaged towers. I did not suspect
that it had been lying in wait for me so many
years, on a dusty shelf, amongst the familiar
toys of my childhood. On the next page are
three Apsaras of the bas-reliefs, with rounded
bosoms copied from models which throbbed a
thousand years ago. They take me back in
spirit to the ballet of the kings of Pnom-Penh,
which was, as it were, the apotheosis of my
pilgrimage, a veritable blaze of gold and colour
and light, scarcely imaginable here amid this
peaceful setting of autumn in my native pro-
vince, while the last wasps of summer are
buzzing idly round me. My inattentive eyes
wander from the pages I am turning over to
172
Siam
the horizon, filled now with a golden sadness
by the setting sun. If nothing has changed
in my museum of yore, so, too, has everything
remained unaltered in this part of my native
town, which is falling more and more into
desuetude, as its maritime activity is little by
little being withdrawn. The same stretches
of wall, covered with the same jasmine and
creepers; the same Roman-tiled roofs, turning
yellow with the rust of time ; the same chimneys
whose every outline I recognise so well against
the sky of this close of an autumn day. The
trees of the gardens, which were already old
when I began to live, have not grown sensibly
older since. The great elms of the ramparts,
which even then were centenarian, are still there,
forming a girdle as magnificent as ever with
their same green tufts. And when everything
around has preserved itself unchanged, how
difficult it is to imagine, how hard to admit,
that I myself am nearly done with, simply
because I shall soon attain the number of years
allotted, without mercy, to the average of
existences. Heavens ! to finish when you feel
that nothing in you has changed, and that the
same zest for adventure, the same hunger after
the unknown would possess you still, did but
173
Siam
the cause remain ! Is it possible, alas ! in the
presence of this simple but unchanging scene
which ought, one might think, to envelop you
in a kind of protection, to impregnate you a
little with its faculty of duration, is it possible
in the presence of all this which perpetuates
itself so easily, to have been a child for whom
the world is about to open, to have been that
which has its life to live, and to become at last
no more than that which has lived its life ?
And, nevertheless, out of my short life,
scattered about over the whole world, I shall
have extracted something, a kind of lore which
does not yet suffice, but has brought already
a promise of serenity. In my travels, I have
seen so many places of passionate adoration,
each one responding to a particular form of
the human agony, so many pagodas, so many
mosques, so many cathedrals, where the same
prayer has been poured forth from the depths
of hearts the most diverse ! These things have
not only disclosed to me that cold half-proof
of the existence of a God which was indicated
in the philosophical courses of my youth, and
to-day is mere idle repetition : " the proof by
the unanimous consent of mankind." Not only
that, but something infinitely more important,
174
Siam
namely, that such a chorus of supplications,
such a widespread testimony of burning tears
imply the almost universal confidence that this
God cannot be other than a God of pity. Nay,
let it not be thought that I am pretending
to say a thing that is the least bit new. I
only wish to add mine to the thousand other
testimonies, in the thought that it may be of
interest, perhaps, to some amongst my fellows.
In proportion as the centuries accumulated on
humanity, the savage gods which it had imagined
on its first issue from original darkness gave
place to conceptions more gentle, less gross,
and, surely, nearer to the truth. In proportion
as the love of one for another, the brotherly love
preached by Buddha and by Jesus, made its
way into our souls, prone naturally to more
savage tendencies, the notion strengthened in
us that there must be somewhere a Supreme
Pity that would hear our cries, and then the
sanctuaries became more and more places of
supplication and of tears. In the mosques of
Islam, from Moghreb to Mecca, never a day
passes but innumerable men, the forehead
beating the gound, appeal to the mercy of
Allah ! The jealous and gloomy Jehovah of
the Hebrews has been effaced before the advent
175
Siam
of Christ, and I have seen the Holy Sepulchre
which is the place in all the world where the
sobs of trustful supplicants may most be heard.
Even at Angkor, Buddhist statues, with a smile
of pardon, are seated before the four doors of
the immured cella in which men, even so
long as a thousand years ago, felt that it was
necessary to hide the terrible God of their
first theogonies. More and more am 1 fain to
believe in the Sovereign Pity, to stretch out
my arms towards it, because I have suffered so
much, under diverse skies, amid enchantments
and amid horrors, and because I have seen so
much suffering, seen so many tears, so many
prayers. In spite of fluctuations, in spite of
vicissitudes, in spite of revolts caused by too
strict dogmas and exclusive formulae, one feels
the existence of this Sovereign Pity affirmed
more and more universally in the lofty souls
who are enlightened by the great new lights
which break upon the world. 1
1 In France, our admirable Bergson, who has overthrown
determinism ; in America, William James and the disciples who
follow him ; in India, a few wise men of Benares and Hadyar.
On the one side by irrefutable logic, on the other by marvellous
observation, all to-day are coining little by little to consolidate
those hopes, which our ancestors, without so much seeking, were
able to discover so surely and so naturally behind the symbols of
the intuitive religions.
176
Siam
Nowadays, it is true, we have amongst us
that lees of half-intelligences, of minds partially
instructed, which the social regime of our time
causes to rise to the surface, and which, in the
name of science, rushes without understanding
into the most imbecile materialism. But, in
the progressive evolution, the reign of these
feeble souls will mark only a negligible episode
of retrogression. The Supreme Pity towards
which we stretch out despairing hands is a
necessity of our existence, by whatever name
we may call it; it is necessary that it should
be there, capable of hearing, at the moment of
the visitations of death, our clamour of infinite
distress. For without it the Creation, to which
one can no longer reasonably ascribe incog-
nizance as an excuse, would become a cruelty
too unthinkable, it would be so odious and so
cowardly.
And out of my numberless pilgrimages, those
that were frivolous and those that were grave,
this feeble argument, so little new as it is, is all
of value that I have been able to carry away.
177
INDEX
Amxi (in Ramayana), 85
Angkor-Thorn, 55, 62-71, 109-
10, 117-24
, extent of, 62-3
, ' e fig - tree of ruins " at,
67-9
, "Gate of Victory" at,
63, 65, 117, 124
, history of, 63-4
, moat at, 62-3
, reconstitution of, 109-10
, ruins at, 65-6, 123, 127
Angkor -Vat, 54-61, 73-112,
124-9
, at mid-day, 54-5
, at night, 78
, at twilight, 72
, causeway, the great, at,
56, 72, 76
, during a storm, 93-6
, exterior gallery, 73, 83-7,
125-6
, , bas-reliefs in, 74-5,
84-7, 125-6
, galleries at, 91-9, 104-8
, Holy of Holies at, 98,
105
, plan of, 90
, sculptures at, 89, 101,
109
Angkor-Vat, spiders at, 94, 97-8
, staircases at, 90-2, 101,
103
, statues of gods at, 66, 94-
8, 104, 107, 111-2
, towers of, 54-5, 72, 105-6
108-9, 111
, windows of, 84, 91, 95-6
Annamites, 11, 20, 51,
Apsaras at Angkor- Vat, 75, 89-
90, 92, 96, 99, 101-2, 109,
126, 128
, defects of, 102
, devotion of women
to, 102
at Bayon, 121
in corps de ballet, 156-7
in Ramayana, 85
Architects of Angkor - Vat,
limitations of, 102-3
Architectural discovery of
Khmers, 103
Aunis, plain of, 171
Avenue leading to Angkor- Vat,
56, 72, 76
BAALBECK, 89
Ballerinas. See Dancing-girls
Ballet, corps de, at Pnom-Penh,
128, 156-61
179
Index
Bas-reliefs at Angkor- Vat, 74,
84-7, 125-6
, condition of, 86-7
at Bayon, 121
Bats at Angkor- Vat, 75, 83, 87-
8, 94, 98-100
Bayon, 69-71, 103, 117-22
, antiquity of, 119
, Apsaras at, 121
, bas-reliefs at, 121
, dilapidation of, 118
, ' f fig-tree of ruins " at, 67-
9, 117-9
, Holy of Holies at, 122
, ornamentation of walls,
121
, quadruple-visaged towers
at, 70-1, 118-21
, reconstitution of, 119-21
, Tevadas at, 121
Bell-turrets at Pnom-Penh, 29
Brahma, representations of, 65,
70-1, 118-21
Brahmanism at Angkor, 63, 98
Bridge leading to Angkor-Vat,
55, 76-7
Buddha, statue of, 98, 104, 108
Buddhism at Angkor- Vat, 64,
98
Buddhist statues at Angkor- Vat,
66, 94-8, 104, 107, 111-2
Burmah, pilgrims from, 107
CAMBODIAN Kings, Mausoleum
of, 144
Cambodians, Hindoo strain in,
21, 52
, relation of, to Khmers, 64
Canoes, 20
, racing, 26
Causeway, the great, at Angkor-
Vat, 56, 72, 76
Cement not used by Khmers, 87
Cemetery at Saigon, 12-3, 15
Charente, 172
Cloisters at Angkor- Vat, 91-2
Corps de ballet, performance of,
156-61
DANCES, ritual, 32, 158
Dancing-girls at Pnom-Penh,
31,32
, costumes, 157-8
, likeness to Apsaras, 156-7
, poses, 158-9, 161
Dew, 79, 83
Diti (in Ramayaua), 85
Draughtsmanship, shortcoming
of Khmers, 102
ELEPHANTS, 31, 142
Ellora, temple of, 104
Empire of Khmers. See Khmer
" FEVER of the woods," 62, 66
" Fig-tree of ruins," 67-9, 117-9
Fish-traps, 20
Foreshortening, ignorance of,
of Khmers, 102
Forest, the submerged, 39-44,
133-4
, travelling in, 63-4, 62,
115-7
Four-faced towers. See " Quad-
ruple-visaged " towers
Francis L, 101
French soldiers at Saigon, 11, 15
GALLERIES in Angkor- Vat, 91-9,
104-8
180
Index
Gallery, exterior of Angkor- Vat,
73, 83-7, 125-6
Gandharwas (in Ramayana), 85
" Gate of Victory " at Angkor-
Thorn, 63, 65, 117, 124
HABITATIONS, 20, 21, 50, 52, 58
of the monks, 57
Hangar of pilgrims at Angkor-
Vat, 58-9
Hindoo strain in Cambodians,
21, 52
Holy of Holies at Angkor- Vat,
98, 105
at Bayon, 122
Horns in decoration of temples,
30
INDIAN strain in Cambodians,
21, 52
Inhabitants of villages on the
way to Angkor, 20-1, 50-1
JUNGLE. See Bush
fever. See " Fever of the
woods "
KHMER Empire, 63-4, 119
, duration of, 110, 123
, splendour of, 123
Khmers, architecture of, 102-3.
, ignorance of, of fore-
shortening, 102
, , of vault, 102-3
King Norodom. See Norodom
Kompong-Luong, 53, 127, 141
Kyacyapa (in Ramayana), 85
LAKE, the great (Tonle Sap),
34-5, 39-44, 134-6
Landes, inhabitants of the, 116
Limoise, woods of, 171
MEDICIS, 101
Mekong, the, 14-21, 33-4, 137,
141, 150, 162
Memphis, 103
Moat at Angkor-Thorn, 62-3
Angkor-Vat, 55
Monastery near Kompoug -
Luong, 144
Monks at Angkor, 57-8, 88
, garb of, 57
, habitations of, 57
, psalmody of, 57
Mytho, 14
NAGA, the sacred. See Seven -
headed serpent
Norodom, King, 16, 25, 127-8,
153
, corps de ballet of, 156-
61
, palace of, 29-32
ORNAMENTATION of walls of
Angkor- Vat, 101, 109
of Bayon, 121
Ox-carts, 51-2
PAGODA dedicated to Queen-
Mother of Cambodia, 146-9
, Royal, at Pnom-Penh, 29-
32
Palace, Royal, at Pnom-Penh,
29-32
Pilgrims, devotion of, 97, 107
from Burmah, 107
Pilgrims' shelter at Angkor,
58-9
181
Index
"Plain of Tombs/' 13
Pnonij meaning of term, 145
Pnom-Penh, 16, 21, 25-33, 150,
153-62
, dancing-girls at, 31-2
, performance of corps de
ballet at, 156-61
, Royal Palace at, 29-
32
, water festival at, 25-6
" Prince of Death. " See Shiva
' ' QUADRUPLE- VISAGED " towers of
Bayon, 70-1, 119-21
Queen - Mother of Cambodia,
pagoda of, 146-9
RACING canoes, 26
Rain at Angkor-Thorn, 68-9
Angkor- Vat, 93-6
Rama, 86
Ramayana, 63, 85-6, 125,
159-62
, scenes from, rendered by
corps de ballet, 1 59-61
, summary of, 85-6
SAIGON, 11-13, 127, 162
Sampans, 42, 133
Seven-headed serpent, 56, 62,
101
Shiva, 67
Siem-Reap, 52-4, 129
Sita, 86, 161
Sovereign Pity, the growing
faith in, 175-6
Spiders in Angkor -Vat, 94,
97-8
Staircases of Angkor- Vat, 90-2,
101, 103
Statues of gods in Angkor- Vat,
66, 94-8, 104, 107, 111-2
, condition of, 97
Storm clouds, 39-40, 135-6
TEMPLES. See Angkor- Vat and
Bayon
Tevadas, 121
Thebes, 89
Tonle Sap. See Lake, the great
Towers of Angkor- Vat, 54-5, 72,
105-6, 108-9, 111
Bayon, 70-1, 119-21
VALMIKI, 86
Varuni (in Ramayana), 85
Vasuki (in Ramayaua), 85
Vault, the Khmers ignorant of,
102-3
Villages on the way to Angkor,
19-21, 34, 50, 52
WATER Festival at Pnom-Penh,
25-6
Windows of Angkor - Vat, 84,
91, 95-6
YOLOFFS, 169
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