The Gentleman in the Parlour – XXXVII

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On my journey up the river and across the lake I read the Travels in Indo-China of Henri Mouhot, a French naturalist, who was the first European to give a detailed description of the ruins of Angkor. His book is pleasant to read. It is a painstaking and straight-forward account very characteristic of the period when the traveller had still the ingenuous belief that people who did not dress, eat, talk and think as he did were very odd, and not quite human; and M. Mouhot narrated many things that would scarcely excite the astonishment of the more sophisticated and also more modest traveller of our day. But apparently he was not always accurate and my copy of his book had been at some time annotated in pencil by a later pilgrim. The corrections were neatly written in a hand that looked determined, but whether this not so, this far from it, this quite wrong, this a palpable error were due to a disinterested desire for truth, a wish to guide future readers, or merely to a sense of superiority, I had no means of telling. Perhaps, however, poor Mouhot may justly claim a certain indulgence, for, dying before he completed his journey, he had no opportunity to correct and explain his notes. Here are the last two entries in his diary:

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

Now, my dear Jenny, let us converse together. Do you know of what I often think when every one around me is asleep, and I, lying wrapped in my mosquito-curtains, let my thoughts wander back to all the members of my family? Then I seem to hear again the charming voice of my little Jenny, and to be listening once more to "La Traviata," "The Death of Nelson," or some other of the airs that I loved so much to hear you sing. I then feel regret, mingled with joy, at the souvenir of the happy–oh, how happy!–past. Then I open the gauze curtains, light my pipe, and gaze out upon the stars, humming softly the "Patre" of Béranger, or the "Odd Sergeant"..

By the portrait 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 naïvely 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 grown enormous trees, towering above you, shrubs of all kinds and dank weeds; they grown among the crumbling masonry, forcing it apart, and their roots writhe like snakes upon the surfaces 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 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.

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