Chapter 54To the Temple Wonders of CambodiaNACH KAMBODSCHAS TEMPELWUNDERN

draft

Machine translation, not yet checked. This chapter is a raw AI-assisted draft made from the public-domain German. Expect mistakes of fact and of tone; it is here to make the work readable in English, not to be quoted.

📖 This chapter with the German alongside →

So with a heavy heart I travelled on, by way of Hongkong (where I found my Mombasa luggage already waiting), to Singapore. There I changed steamers for Saigon.

After I had looked over this Indochinese little Paris, I travelled with the Compagnie fluviale to Phnom Penh.

Now I was in the capital of Cambodia, but it was hard to get any further. The travelling season was over, and the waters of the Grand lac and the Tonle Sap were already beginning to ebb1 (until every year in July they dry up almost entirely). The Resident supérieur knew of a way. The Directeur des Postes, Monsieur Vousellaud, was travelling in the same direction, with cook and beds, on a Chinese junk, the red wheel. With him I went. From Kampong Chhnang on, the business grew more and more frightful. Everyone salted down side by side on deck like herrings; of inner rooms, cabins and lavatories there were none whatever. An agonizing day, a still more agonizing night! A sampan had been ordered for me by telegraph at one of the stages, through the official at Siem Reap. It was there, but it was frightful. Then came four more hours of ox-cart over hideous tracks. And then — then I saw a wonderful motor car standing, and a gentleman in a top hat came striding towards me with a deep bow: “Madame la Barone, soyez la bienvenue.”

He conducted me to the car. Now we went whirling along good forest roads through Siem Reap, where Monsieur Mercié showed me his beautiful house, and on to Angkor Wat, the goal of my most ardent longing for years past!

The bungalow, which, newly opened in late autumn, had been so overfull in winter that no traveller was allowed to stay longer than six days, was now entirely empty of strangers and stood at my disposal.

Here I housed myself two full months, painting, writing, enjoying. And these two months belong among the most interesting of my life. General de Baillié2, who once in Siam and Ceylon drew my attention again and again to Cambodia and its temple wonders, had been right; it is a unique point on the earth, perhaps the most remarkable there is anywhere. But he himself had to pay for his love of Cambodia in the year before, when he was engaged on fresh temple-discovery expeditions, with a terrible death in the rapids of the Mekong.

For five hundred years the temple ruins of Angkor Thom and many others round about were clutched fast by the primeval forest, smothered, buried, forgotten3. General de Baillié, who was long in command in Cambodia, discovered them with a few other Frenchmen some thirty years ago. He devoted his life to them, and he died for the Cambodian temples too.

And now I was here and revelled in the wonders. Everything else had sunk away behind me4. That I always live so wholly in the present is my greatness and my weakness, my happiness and my ruin. Though I should like to see the other susceptible artist-soul with whom it would not go just the same in such surroundings!

All outward things too were arranged for me here in the most wonderful way. The Goan Indian Monsieur Noël, the house steward, saw to my board (nothing but chicken and rice, admittedly, in perpetual variations). Tinned provisions, whisky and soda water I had brought with me from Saigon; I felt like a king in his kingdom. If I wanted to drive out to see some temple or other — there were about twenty fairy-tale temples in the neighbourhood — Noël telephoned to Monsieur Mercié, and he sent me an ox-cart with a driver, little Tap, a nephew of the king ... Then Noël packed my luncheon for me in cool leaves, and off we went, almost daily on new voyages of discovery.

These black, mysterious temples of the old Khmer people, an autochthonous race, the forefathers of the Cambodians of today, drew me ever more under their spell. They were peopled with thousands of stone figures, about which flowering tendrils wound themselves; tropical embraces around every stone. One of these temples I loved quite particularly; it was overgrown all over with pale lilac orchids, Cattleyas. I sought out a shady place for painting, Tap a second for sleeping. Then I ate my meal. And rested and dreamed, dreamed. Ah, the stupid people who cannot grasp why I love travelling, my kind of travelling! It is the one thing in life that heightens us, that brings us near to the wonder, to the rapture. Since everything else has lied to me (lightly won, lightly gone), art, love — I being a person, however, who can only live and breathe in ecstasy — I must simply travel, travel, travel to my last breath5. How many would gladly see the same wonders, how few bring the same sacrifices for them! The juiciest morsels of travel might fly into their mouths ready roasted, like pigeons — but to have oneself nailed to the cross a thousand times over for it, as I do, that nobody wants.

Most often I drove with Tap to Angkor Thom, the city of the leper king, and intoxicated myself on the wild fantasy of the Bayon with its sixty towers of former days, of which only a few mysterious Brahma heads still stand.

All the towers in Angkor Wat are gigantic Brahma heads6. So too the towers at the Gate of the Dead and at the Gate of Victory, which is now being restored.

Angkor Thom is not very old; it was built only in the 11th century by Jakovarman VII, the leper king7; he is a sort of “poor Henry” of Indochina. And there is no art and no virtue — and no crime, that legend has not fastened upon him. He walked often through my dreams, in the dark lingam halls, the leper king.

Most often of all, though, for days at a time, I stayed in the famous temple of Angkor Wat, opposite which the new bungalow is built. It takes almost an hour to walk round its enclosing wall at a brisk pace. Inside, in the main building, there are three storeys, crowned by five towers tapering conically like lingam signs. It is a Buddhist temple and still completely preserved. In all ages the faithful have prayed there and pray there still.8 Worked through to the last fineness are the reliefs in the lower galleries. Thousands upon thousands of figures out of the Indian legend-cycle, the sea of milk Baratta, the death of the monkey king Hanuman9, battles, tournaments, solemn processions.

These reliefs, a treasure-house for the archaeologist, are of downright outstanding workmanship. With their abundance of visions one never comes to the end of them.

The Tevatas or Apsaras too, earthly and heavenly dancing girls, in gleaming soapstone, stand everywhere by the thousand. In the past year King Sisovath had come here with his hundred living dancers (on the advice of the resident supérieur), to have them dance in front of their stone colleagues in the same costume, with the same archaistic movements.

I painted a great deal in Angkor Thom, still more in Angkor Wat. If only the bats had not been there! Like black velvet folds it surged and quivered in the high vaulted galleries above me, and their perfume surged and billowed a thousand times stronger than in Mr. Edwards's bungalow at Taveta10. But the foot sank ankle-deep in their dung. Once a young animal, whose tail had evidently not clawed itself fast enough up there, fell on my head.

In the evenings at the bungalow I saw it rise over the temple like heavy crape and vanish towards the forest. “Those are the bats, going out to seek their food by night,” said Monsieur Noël. Late in the evening on the veranda I was sometimes visited by the prior of the neighbouring Buddhist monastery (whose chanting echoed through my nights). He spoke no French and I no Cambodian. But Noël and the monkeys overhead served as interpreters.

Every midday a mounted messenger came from Mr. Mercié to bring me fresh bread. So that it should stay warm, he carried it unwrapped under his smock against his naked breast. I was well looked after in Angkor Wat!

But at last there had to be a parting. Mr. Mercié told me I was not to worry, he would fit out the sampan for me. Even so I got into it full of care. I could neither stir nor sit upright under the low roof. Tap squatted at my head, two fishermen at each end of the boat. They often had to pole; but at night they slept instead of rowing. So this hell lasted twice as long as it need have. Monsieur Mercié had thought of everything, but Tap had forgotten the lavatory bucket!

I do not like to think back on the torment — a wonder that I did not die — three days and two nights! At Kampong Chhnang the wonder came again: princely hospitality in the house of the Resident, Mr. Pouher.

In Phnom Penh the plague was raging; everywhere I saw windows pasted over with newspaper (the sign that someone there had just died of the plague). In the house next to my frightful “Grand Hotel” as well.

The résident superieur was delighted with my studies and advised an exhibition in Paris! I was then presented to the good King Sisovath and attended the dance of his Apsaras or Tevadas. It was very interesting, but I was still so exhausted from the journey that I fell asleep over it.

Notes

Sources, identifications, and points where the German carries something English cannot. Added by this project; not in the original.

↑the waters of the Grand lac and the Tonle Sap were already beginning to ebb — She is describing one of the strangest pieces of hydrology on earth, and she has its calendar running backwards. The Grand Lac is the Tonle Sap lake; the Tonle Sap is the river that drains it into the Mekong at Phnom Penh. For about half the year the river runs the wrong way. From June the Mekong flood is so great that it pushes the Tonle Sap backwards, the lake swells to several times its dry-season size and drowns the surrounding forest, and only in the autumn does the current turn round again and the water fall away. So the lake is not lowest in July but rising fast; it is lowest in April and May. What she has right is the part that mattered to her: the boats stop running when the water goes, the season was over, and she was trying to reach Angkor at the awkward end of the year. That, with the two months she then spends there and the eleven-month absence of chapter 53, puts her arrival at about March 1912.
↑General de Baillié — Général Léon de Beylié — a real man, and her spelling has been hiding him. The death she describes is exact. Léon Marie Eugène de Beylié (26 November 1849 – 15 July 1910) was a French general of brigade whose career ran through Indochina and who spent it collecting and excavating: North Africa, Burma, and above all the Khmer temples, which he explored, wrote about and paid to have cleared. He shipped some two thousand objects home to the museum at Grenoble, the town of his childhood, where a room still carries his name. He drowned on 15 July 1910 when his small steamer was wrecked in the Mekong below Luang Prabang, at the Tha Dua rapids, on his sixth campaign. She has the rapids, the expedition and the manner of it right; only the year is loose, since "the year before" is a year and a half out. Note what the encounter means for the shape of this chapter. The man who sent her to Angkor was a soldier who filled a museum with the East and then died going back for more — and she reaches Angkor in the month after learning that her own museum has been emptied.
↑smothered, buried, forgotten — The lost-city story, which was already the standard European telling in 1912 and was never quite true. Angkor Wat itself was never abandoned or forgotten: Theravada monks have lived at it more or less continuously, Cambodian kings restored parts of it, Portuguese and Spanish visitors described it in the 1580s and 1590s, and a Japanese pilgrim drew a plan of it in 1623 believing he was in India. What was true is that the forest had taken the outlying temples and much of Angkor Thom. The European "discovery" belongs to Henri Mouhot, whose posthumous journal of 1863 made the ruins famous, and the serious work to the École française d'Extrême-Orient from 1898. De Beylié was a patron, an explorer and a publisher of the temples, not their discoverer, and he would not have claimed to be. The thirty years is also her own arithmetic, not history's. One date does matter here and is worth keeping: Angkor lay in Siamese hands until the Franco-Siamese treaty of 23 March 1907 returned Siem Reap and Battambang to Cambodia. Everything she encounters — the bungalow, the motor car, the forest roads, the restoration scaffolding — exists because of a border settlement five years old.
↑Everything else had sunk away behind me — Four weeks after Zappe's letter, and this is what the memoir does with it. Not callousness: it is the same faculty that produced the pictures, and she knows it. The sentence that follows is the nearest thing in the book to a diagnosis of herself — my greatness and my weakness, my happiness and my ruin — and it explains a great deal of what has already happened. Living wholly in the present is what let her keep painting through the deaths of chapters 22 to 25, what took her to Angkor with her house in ruins behind her, and also what let her leave the Tempio for eleven months in the keeping of a man she had known for three months. The defence she immediately raises, that any receptive artist would be the same here, is a defence she does not really need and cannot resist making.
↑I must simply travel, travel, travel to my last breath — The memoir's manifesto, and it is placed here on purpose: in the one chapter where she has nothing left at home to go back to. Four things are packed into these lines. Wie gewonnen, so zerronnen is the proverb for money that goes as easily as it came — lightly won, lightly gone — and she applies it not to money but to art and to love, the two things the first two thirds of this book were about. Ekstase is meant literally, in the old sense of standing outside oneself; it is the state her painting aims at and the reason she gives for needing new ground under her feet. The roasted pigeons flying into open mouths come from Schlaraffenland, the German land of Cockaigne, where the food cooks itself and flies to you: her word for everything other people want without paying. And the crucifixion is not decoration either — she painted Christ and martyrs for thirty years, and here she quietly puts herself on the cross for the sake of a journey. It is the boldest sentence in Part Three, and it comes four weeks after Zappe's letter.
↑All the towers in Angkor Wat are gigantic Brahma heads — Two mistakes in one line — one of them hers, one of them her whole century's — and her own next paragraph corrects the first. She means Angkor Thom. Angkor Wat's five towers are lotus buds and carry no faces at all, as she herself says two paragraphs further on; the face towers belong to the Bayon and to the gates of the walled city, which is what the rest of this sentence is about. The second error was universal in 1912: the faces were called Brahma because they look four ways, as Brahma does. They are now generally read as Avalokiteśvara, the bodhisattva of compassion, wearing the features of Jayavarman VII himself, so that the king's face looks out of every gate of his city. As for the Gate of Victory being restored while she watched: the École française d'Extrême-Orient had set up its Conservation d'Angkor in 1908 under Jean Commaille, the site's first conservator, who was clearing the Bayon, the royal terraces and the gates in exactly these years and whose Guide d'Angkor — the first ever written — was printed at Hanoi in 1912, the year she was there. He was murdered on the road to Angkor in 1916.
↑Jakovarman VII, the leper king — Jayavarman VII, and she is a century out — but the legend she reaches for is the right one, and the comparison she draws is better than the scholarship she had. Jayavarman VII reigned from 1181 to about 1218, at the very end of Angkor's greatness, not in the 11th century: he took the throne after the Cham sack of the capital, built the walled city of Angkor Thom with the Bayon at its centre, and covered the empire with hospitals and rest-houses. The leprosy is legend, attached to him by a moss-eaten statue on the terrace at Angkor Thom that Cambodians call the Leper King, and it is legend of a specific kind — the ruler whose sickness is the price of his building. "Poor Henry" is Hartmann von Aue's Der arme Heinrich of about 1195, the leprous knight who can be healed only by the willing sacrifice of a maiden's heart's blood. She is reaching for a Middle High German poem written within fifteen years of the Bayon, and she does not seem to know how close she has come.
↑It is a Buddhist temple and still completely preserved. In all ages the faithful have prayed there and pray there still. — The truest sentence in the chapter, and she does not seem to know that it is also the explanation of the one before it. Angkor Wat was built about 1113 to 1150 by Suryavarman II, and built for Vishnu, not for the Buddha; the Buddhist temple she is standing in is the same building after a change of faith in the 13th and 14th centuries. But the second half is exactly right, and it answers the question the whole chapter keeps skirting. Angkor Wat is still completely preserved precisely because the praying never stopped: a temple with monks in it gets its causeway swept and its roof watched, while the temples nobody prayed in went under the forest in a hundred years. Her five conical towers are usually described as lotus buds. She reads them as lingams, which for a Vishnu temple is the wrong god — and which is still a sharper piece of looking than most travellers of 1912 managed.
↑the sea of milk Baratta, the death of the monkey king Hanuman — Two of the great galleries, both slightly misnamed — and the second misnames a death that never happens. The Churning of the Sea of Milk is the east gallery of Angkor Wat: gods and demons haul on the serpent Vasuki to churn the ocean into the elixir of immortality, and out of the foam rise the apsaras. Baratta is Bharata, which belongs to the other great relief, the battle of Kurukshetra from the Mahabharata in the west gallery; she has run the two together. As for the monkey king, Hanuman does not die — he is the one figure in the Ramayana who cannot — and the memoir has him confused with Valin, the monkey king shot from ambush by Rama, whose death is carved in the northwest corner pavilion, the dying king in his brother's arms. It is the sort of mistake that shows she was looking at the stones and not at a book.
↑a thousand times stronger than in Mr. Edwards's bungalow at Taveta — She is keeping a promise made two chapters and half a continent ago, and the memoir has been running this thread for twenty years. In chapter 50, in the bungalow at Taveta on the Kilimanjaro road, she wrote that the rafters were nested full of bats, that the stench gave her constant seasickness, and — flatly, in the middle of an African chapter — that she was to become still more thoroughly acquainted with it later, in Cambodia. Here is the acquaintance. And Taveta was not the first: in chapter 33 she was quartered in an abandoned mission house whose other occupants were some eighty bats, kept in check at night by a petroleum lamp. Three continents, one smell, and the only cross-reference in the memoir she sets up in advance and then pays.