The Gentleman In the Parlour (23 page)

19th
– Attacked by fever.

29th
– Have pity on me, oh my God … !

And here is the beginning of a letter he wrote a little while before he died:

Louang Prabang (Laos),
23rd July
, 1861.

By the portraits of him he was a man of an open countenance, with a full curly beard and a long moustache, and his thinning curly hair gave him a noble brow. In a frock coat he looked a respectable rather than a romantic figure, but in a
beret
with a long tassel there was in his mien something dashing and naively ferocious. He might then very well have passed for a corsair in a drama of the sixties.

But it was a very different Angkor Wat that met the intrepid gaze of Henri Mouhot from that which the tourist now can so conveniently visit. If indeed you are curious to know what this stupendous monument looked like before the restorer set to work upon it (it must be admitted unobtrusively), you can get a very good impression by taking a narrow path through the forest when you will come presently upon a huge grey gateway covered with lichen and moss. On the upper part of it, on the four sides, dimly emerging from ruined masonry is, four times repeated, the impassive head of Siva. On each side of the gateway, half hidden by jungle, are the remains of a massive wall and in front of it, choked with weeds and water-plants, a broad moat. Entering you find yourself in a vast courtyard, strewn with fragments of
statues and green stones on which you vaguely discern sculpture; you walk softly on dead brown leaves and they squelch ever so faintly under your tread. Here grow enormous trees, towering above you, shrubs of all kinds and dank weeds; they grow among the crumbling masonry, forcing it apart, and their roots writhe like snakes upon the surface of the stony soil. The courtyard is surrounded by ruined corridors and you climb hazardously up steep, slippery and broken stairs, threading your way through passages and vaulted chambers dripping with wet and heavy with the stink of bats; the pedestals on which stood the gods are overturned, the gods are gone. And in the corridors and on the terraces the tropical vegetation grows fiercely. Here and there the great pieces of carved stone hang perilously. Here and there on a bas-relief still miraculously in place stand the dancing-girls veiled with lichen, mockingly, in their everlasting gestures of abandonment.

For centuries nature has waged its battle with the handiwork of man; it has covered, disfigured and transformed it, and now all these buildings that a multitude of slaves built with so much labour lie a confused tangle among the trees. Here lurk the cobras whose broken images you see on the stones around you. Hawks fly high overhead and the gibbons leap from branch to branch; but it is green and dark and you seem beneath that wanton leafage to wander at the bottom of the sea.

It chanced that one day towards dusk, when I was wandering about this temple, for in its ruin it offered peculiar sensations that I found it curious to expose myself to, I was overtaken by a storm. I had seen the great dark clouds massed in the North-West and it had seemed to me that never again could the temple in the jungle be seen by me more mysteriously; but after a while I felt something strange in the air and looking up saw that the dark clouds were on a sudden charging down upon the forest. The rain came suddenly and then the
thunder, not a single peal but roll upon roll reverberating down the sky, and lightning that blinded me, darting and slashing fiercely. I was deafened and confused by the noise, and the lightning startled me. The rain fell not as in our temperate zone, but with an angry vehemence, in sheets, storming down as though the heavens were emptying themselves of flooded lakes. It seemed to fall with no blind unconscious force, but with a purpose and a malignancy which were, alas, but too human. I stood in a doorway, not a little frightened, and as the lightning tore the darkness like a veil I saw the jungle stretching endlessly before me, and it seemed to me that these great temples and their gods were insignificant before the fierce might of nature. Its power there was so manifest, spoke with so stern and insistent a voice, that it was easy to understand how man had devised his gods and built great temples to house them to serve as a screen between himself and the force that terrified and crushed him. For nature is the most powerful of all the gods.

In case the reader is a trifle perplexed by all this commotion of the elements I will set down now for his edification a few facts of general interest. Angkor was a city of great extent, the capital of a powerful empire, and for ten miles around the jungle is dotted with the remains of the temples that adorned it. Angkor Wat is but one of these and has claimed more than the rest the attentions of the archaeologist, the restorer and the traveller, only because when discovered by the West it was in a less ruined state. No one knows why the city was abandoned so suddenly that they have found blocks of stones in the quarries ready to take their place in an unfinished temple, and the experts have in vain sought for a plausible explanation.

Some of the temples look as though they had been in
great part wantonly destroyed; and the notion has been hazarded that when the rulers after some unfortunate battle fled the country, the wretched slaves who had spent their lives through so many generations to erect these massive buildings in vengeance overthrew what they had been obliged with blood and sweat to construct. This is conjecture. The only thing certain is that here was a city thriving and populous and now there remains nothing but a few ruined temples and the teeming forest. The houses were of wood, surrounded by their little compounds, like the houses I had so lately seen at Keng Tung, and it would not have taken long for them to decay; the jungle, held in check for a while by the business of man, flowed back, an irresistible green sea, upon the scene of his futile activity. At the end of the thirteenth century it was one of the great cities of the East; two hundred years later it was the resort of wild beasts.

Angkor Wat is placed due east and west and the sun rises directly behind the five towers that surmount it. It is surrounded by a broad moat, which you cross by a great causeway paved with flagstones, and the trees are delicately reflected in the still water.

It is an impressive rather than a beautiful building and it needs the glow of sunset or the white brilliance of the moon to give it a loveliness that touches the heart. It is grey veiled by a faint green, which is the colour of the moss and the mould of all the rainy seasons it has seen, but at sunset it is buff, pale and warm. At dawn when the country is bathed in a silver mist the towers have an aspect that is strangely unsubstantial; they have then an airy lightness which they lack in the hard white light of noon. Twice a day, when the sun rises and when it sets, a miracle is performed and they gain a beauty not their own. They are the mystic towers of the spirit's high citadel. The temple and its dependencies are built on a strictly formal plan. This part balances that
and one side repeats the other. The architects exercised no great power of invention, but built on the pattern dictated to them by the rites of their religion. They had neither wanton fancy nor vivid imagination. They yielded to no sudden inspiration. They were deliberate. They gained their effects by regularity and by vastness. The modern eye, of course, has been distorted by the huge buildings that are now so easily constructed, mammoth hotel and enormous apartment house, so that the great size of Angkor Wat must be realised by an effort of the imagination; but to those for whom it was built it must have seemed stupendous. The very steep steps that lead from one storey to another give it a singular effect of height. They are not the broad and noble stairs of the West, fit for the pageantry of processions, but an arduous and hurried means of ascent to the presence of a secret and mysterious god. They render the divinity remote and enigmatic. On each storey, four to each, are large sunken basins in which was water for purification, and the water at those strange heights must have added strangely to the silence and the awe. It is a religion of which the temples are empty and the god lives alone except at stated periods when the devout bring gifts to appease him. It is the house now of innumerable bats and the air is fetid with them; in each dark passage and sombre chamber you hear their twitterings.

This plainness of construction gave the sculptors ample occasion for decoration. Capitals, pilasters, pediments, doorways, windows are enriched with carving of an unimaginable variety. The themes are few, but on them they embroidered many beautiful inventions. Here they had a free hand and with a fury of creation crammed into these narrow limits all the adventures of their impetuous souls. It is interesting to note, as you go from temple to temple, how in the course of centuries these unknown craftsmen passed from rude strength to consummate grace; and how at first, regardless of the
whole they made their decoration an end in itself, but at long last learnt to submit themselves to the general plan. What they lost in power they gained in taste; it is for each one to say which he prefers.

The galleries are adorned with bas-reliefs; they are interminable; they are world-famous; but to attempt to describe them would be as foolish as to attempt to describe the jungle. Here you have princes on elephants with the state umbrellas open over their heads making a progress among graceful trees; they form a pleasing pattern which is repeated along the length of a wall like the pattern of a paper. There you have long lines of soldiers marching into battle, and the gestures of their arms and the movements of their legs follow the same formal design as that of the dancers in a Cambodian dance. But they join battle and break into frenzied movement; even the dying and the dead are contorted into violent attitudes. Above them the chieftains advance on their elephants and in their chariots, brandishing swords and lances. And you get a feeling of unbridled action, of the turmoil and stress of battle, a breathlessness, an agitation and a disorder, which is infinitely curious. Every inch of the space is covered with figures, horses, elephants and chariots, you can discern neither plan nor pattern, and only the chariot-wheels rest the eye in this chaos. You cannot discover a rhythm. For it was not beauty that the artists sought, but action; they cared little for elegance of gesture or purity of line; theirs was no emotion recollected in tranquillity, but a living passion that brooked no limits. Here is nothing of the harmony of the Greeks, but the rush of a torrential stream and the terrible, vehement life of the jungle. Yet there are not a few that are withal as lovely as the Elgin Marbles and when you look at them you would be dull indeed if you were not caught by the rapture that pure beauty affords. But alas, this excellence was produced only for a brief period; for the rest the drawing for the most part is poor and
the patterns tedious. The sculptors seem to have been content to go on from generation to generation slavishly copying one another and you wonder that sheer boredom did not induce them now and again to break into a new design. The draughtsmen who make laborious drawings of them discern in the sameness many differences, but they are only such as you might find in a piece of prose copied by a hundred hands. The writing is different, but the sense remains the same. And as I wandered about looking disconsolately at so much that was dull I wished that I had by my side a philosopher who could explain to me why it is that man can never remain in one stay. Why is it, I wanted to ask him, that having known the best he should content himself so comfortably with the mediocre? Is it that circumstances – or is it genius, the genius of the individual? – raise him for a while to heights at which he cannot breathe easily so that he is content to make his way down again to the homely plain? Is man like water that can be forced to an artificial altitude, but that reverts as soon as the force is removed to its own level? It looks as though his normal condition were the lowest state of civilisation compatible with his environment and in this he can remain unchanged from age to age. Perhaps my philosopher would have told me that only a few races are capable of raising themselves above the dust, and then only for a little while; and even they are conscious that their state is extraordinary, and they fall back with relief to the condition that is only a little better than the beasts. But if he had, then I would have asked him if man were not perfectible. But I should have accepted it with humility if he had said: come along, don't stay there talking a lot of nonsense, let's go and have tiffin. I should have said to myself that perhaps he had varicose veins and to stand so long made his legs ache.

I came to the last day I could spend at Angkor. I was leaving it with a wrench, but I knew by now that it was the sort of place that, however long one stayed, it would always be a wrench to leave. I saw things that day that I had seen a dozen times, but never with such poignancy; and as I sauntered down those long grey passages and now and then caught sight of the forest through a doorway all I saw had a new beauty. The still courtyards had a mystery that made me wish to linger in them a little longer, for I had a notion that I was on the verge of discovering some strange and subtle secret; it was as though a melody trembled in the air, but so low that the ears could just not catch it. Silence seemed to dwell in these courts like a presence that you could see if you turned round and my last impression of Angkor was like my first, that of a great silence. And it gave me I know not what strange feeling to look at the living forest that surrounded this great grey pile so closely, the jungle luxuriant and gay in the sunlight, a sea of different greens; and to know that there all round me had once stood a multitudinous city.