Dragon apparent, p.23
Dragon Apparent, page 23
When it was clear that the interview had run its normal and reasonable course, there was an awkward moment. The conversation lagged and the king’s smile became a little fixed. The time had come to withdraw and I waited for the king to indicate, by rising, that the interview was at an end. But it was becoming evident that innate politeness was too strong for the conventions of royal deportment. Forming the conclusion that if I did not make the first move we should both be condemned to sit there indefinitely, exchanging painful smiles and trying to think of something to say, I got up. I am sure that His Majesty was grateful.
* * *
That evening, which was my last at Phnom Penh, I had an extraordinary piece of good luck. In the course of my travels I was coming to accept that wherever I was I was fated to experience a subnormal amount of the customary activities. The theatre would be closed, the custom abolished, the service discontinued, the road cut by bandits, the tiger invisible, the season just over – or not yet started. But at Phnom Penh, I was in luck. I went out of the hotel at about five in the evening and walked right into the most rampageous of Chinese celebrations – the procession of the twenty-five spirits, which the police had done their best to prevent and which had now broken loose, providing as fair an example of the medieval Chinese idea of a good time for all as it would have been possible to see in these days.
There is an alien northern vigour about such Chinese divertissements which is quite outlandish in the languorous and debilitating tropics. Moreover a century or two’s sojourn in the deep South has done nothing to calm the Chinese temperament, nor caused them to develop any relish for the sedate posturings of Indonesia. When the Chinese dance, they leap and twirl, a spectacle I had observed before at the Mardi Gras comparsas in Havana, when the Chinese community decided to participate, suddenly appearing on the streets with their dragon, and startling even the bloodshot-eyed negroes of Cuba with their exertions. Wherever there are Chinese communities such celebrations as the twenty-five spirits tend to be discountenanced, as they disrupt all activities while they are in progress, and produce a state of exaltation which sometimes ends in riot. There had been an official attempt at interference with the Phnom Penh procession which should have accompanied the Chinese New Year, and was some two weeks delayed.
By five o’clock the non-Chinese citizens had long since given up trying to go about their business and had resigned themselves to calling it a day. All the cars were taken off the roads and the shops were shut, while the twenty-five spirits, incarnated in their human representatives – both male and female – were carried round and round the town, in palanquins, on thrones and on stages accompanied by their altars and cult objects from the various pagodas. Each spirit was preceded by a dragon, a rabble of standard bearers, and a horde of attendants running amok with gongs and drums. The spirits themselves looked like the old-fashioned idea of Chinese pirates, even to the sashes tied round their foreheads. They kept up a lusty howling, twirled their swords and frothed at the lips. Occasionally a particularly energetic spirit would make a flying leap from his throne or platform, seize a bystander and join with him in a frenzied Tartar dance, while the surrounding cult devotees clashed their cymbals and howled like damned souls. Other spirits confined to their palanquins swayed from side to side in the throes of cataleptic seizure, pausing only to inflict slight self-mutilations with their knives or to thrust skewers through their cheeks. I was told that the celebrants had all drugged themselves with hypodermic injections before setting out, five hours previously; but now it was evident that some of the effect was wearing off, as under the strain of carrying the altars and palanquins, some of the bearers were beginning to collapse. When this happened a spirit would be thrown into the crowd with even more violence than he bargained for.
At this stage the rickshaw coolies were beginning to reap the harvest. They lay in wait in the side-streets ready to pick up the victims of syncope, self-inflicted wounds and various types of seizure. By the time the procession had disintegrated they had done a roaring trade. That night half the coolies in Phnom Penh were gambling in the Casino and owing to a temporary hold-up in the workings of the laws of average a lot of them actually won. For the first time in its short history the syndicate found themselves down on the evening. This shocking circumstance was followed next day by the dismissal of all those girl croupiers who intone so melodiously the winning numbers; not because they were suspected of cheating, but because they were unlucky.
CHAPTER 15
Angkor
I GOT A LIFT on a French military lorry that was going to Siem-Reap, the nearest town to the ruins of Angkor Vat; arriving there without incident – by courtesy of Dap Chhuon – on the evening of the same day.
Siem-Reap was another slumbering Shangri-La, perfumed slightly with putrid fish-sauce. In a palm-shaded river meandering through it both the sexes bathed all day long, lifting up their garments with extreme modesty as they allowed their bodies to sink below the level of the milk-chocolate-coloured water. When they had had enough of bathing they sat on the bank and caught occasional fish with lengths of cotton and bent pins.
With the ingeniousness of clever, lazy people, the Cambodians had worked out an irrigation system that looked as if a comic artist had had a hand in its construction. There were hundreds of great, rickety waterwheels turning slowly all day and splashing tumblers-full of water into conduits, that in their turn ran into a crazy network of bamboo tubes and finally reached the pocket-handkerchief-sized gardens that people bothered to cultivate. It was all very inefficient and wasteful and probably only a quarter of the water taken out of the river eventually got to the gardens. Some of the scoops only scooped up a thimbleful of water and others were set in the wheels at such an angle that they missed the collecting chute and the water went back into the river again. But all the open bamboo channels leading to the gardens had a trickle running through them and, until that dried up no one would be disposed to worry.
There were many baleful-looking dogs, like miniature hyenas, with wrinkled snouts and foreheads; almost hairless and sometimes tail-less. Each house possessed one of these small, ugly creatures, which seemed to lay claim to a certain area round the house and therefore advanced with a hideous snarling and yapping when one entered it. One was then escorted with furious menaces to the boundary of the next cur’s territory and so passed on down the road. The dogs never barked at Cambodians.
Everywhere the air was filled with the sweet creaking sound of the irrigation wheels mingled with the song of some bulbul that sang like a blackbird. The houses were the normal Cambodian shacks, standing on piles above their refuse. Beside each was the usual receptacle raised on a post with the offerings for wandering and neglected spirits – those who had no descendants on earth left to provide for them. But in this custom the Cambodians had bettered the Vietnamese, furnishing as a temporary sanctuary for these ghostly paupers most elegant little multi-tiered pagodas.
I found that the girls of a Cambodian country town were liable to smile at and even address strangers, especially if their courage was fortified by numbers. Dressed in sarong-like skirts of plain colours, with a blouse hardly reaching the midriff or perhaps just a scarf concealing the breasts, they would come sauntering out of the most squalid hovels, clean, bright and pretty, and with a ready smile of welcome. It was strange to see one of these gliding shapes suddenly galvanised into efficient action at the sight of a cow in her vegetable garden, which she chased out, throwing sticks at it with an accuracy and force that no Western woman could ever hope to emulate.
* * *
Valas had told me that when in Siem-Reap it was more important to see the Cambodian theatre than Angkor itself, because the ruins would wait. But once again it was too late. The Chinese had been granted a month’s licence to run a gambling casino and they had taken over the theatre for this purpose. Anyway, I was told, it was doubtful if the theatre would open again. They were arranging for weekly cinema shows and who would be bothered with going to watch people they had known all their lives dressed up as gods and devils, when they could see a pa-wé for the same money.
But I was at least lucky in one small thing. I had noticed in the king’s audience room a curious decoration consisting of a delicately fretted-out scene from some well-known episode of the Ramayana. The intricate lacing of motives looked, until the rear-illumination was switched on, as if it had been punched out of brass; but when lit-up it proved to be semitransparent and was actually made from treated hide. The king mentioned – and it surprised me that an oriental sovereign should have any appreciation for the arts of his country – that this was a typical pattern used in the old shadow plays, and that they could still be found in Siem-Reap. And in Siem-Reap despite the fact that I was assured that the workshop had long since gone out of business, I tracked it down. There were the artists, squatting on the ground dressing the leather, marking the surface out with chalk, and punching out the traditional patterns. No more orders would be forthcoming for the shadow-theatre of course, but a few private persons still bought their work for decorative purposes. They sold me their showpiece, a delightful Lokesvara, for about fifteen shillings. I learned later from a visit to the Musée de L’homme at Paris that this art is still practised, though in a less finished way, in Siam and in Java.
Although the basis of Cambodian art is Indonesian and there are many recognisable affinities between the decorational motives of Cambodia and of all those countries where the Indian artistic influence has at some time been paramount, the Cambodians have undoubtedly added a flourish of their own, a recognisable style, generated in their aboriginal past, that asserts itself above the general pattern. Unfortunately, as M. Henri Marchal, Conservator of Angkor has said, the Cambodian aristocracy, who were the only patrons of Cambodian art, have abandoned it in the last half-century in favour of European importations. After the loss of their independence rich Cambodians developed an inferiority complex about everything their country produced. European cannons were more effective than the sacred and invincible sword of Cambodia; therefore nothing Cambodian was worth having. The mandarins dismissed the goldsmiths and the sculptors who formed part of their normal households, and bought themselves gilt mirrors and Victorian tasselled furniture.
Perhaps the two most valuable and altruistic works the French have done in the Far East have been the creation in 1930 of the Institut Bouddhique at Phnom Penh (after Catholic missionaries had succeeded in several years in making only one convert), and the establishment in the same city of the École des Arts Cambodgiens. The latter institution has made a desperate and successful attempt to save the situation, by encouraging the production of goods of high artistic value that can be sold in the ordinary way of commerce. The utmost difficulty was experienced in reassembling the artists with whom the old traditions would have died. They had returned to their villages and taken up the cultivation of rice, or fishing. When they were tracked down, it was found that some of them, who were already ageing, had not touched a tool for a quarter of a century. However, the happy fact is that the effort was made just in time, and that the Khmer arts which were on the point of vanishing for ever were given a vigorous artificial respiration and are now in fairly good shape. Naturally enough, they are now directed to commercial ends, and are largely applied to the rather banal objects demanded by the tourist and export trades. It is a stimulating reflection that the imaginative verve and faultless technique of modern Cambodian art at its best is considered by experts to rival that employed in the ornamentation of Angkor, and that this creative ability is now placed within the reach of a wide public in the form of such articles as cigarette cases and powder boxes. According to M. Marchal the present danger lies in the fact that the Cambodian is determined at all costs to be absolutely up to date, and is therefore inclined to turn his back on his own impressive artistic heritage, and allow himself to be too deeply influenced by movements in Europe, purely because they are fashionable and would-be audacious.
As there was nowhere to stay in Siem-Reap, I had to go to the Grand Hotel outside the town, which draws its sporadic nourishment from visitors to Angkor. I returned to the town – a blistering, shadeless walk of a mile – for occasional meals. In the whole of Cambodia there is not a single Cambodian restaurant. True Cambodian dishes, just as Aztec dainties in Mexico and Moorish delicacies in Spain, are only to be eaten in the market booths and wayside stalls of remote towns, which are the last refuges of vanishing, culinary cultures. While from fear of infection, one dared not at Siem-Reap risk those brilliant rissoles, those strange membraneous sacks containing who knows what empirically discovered titbit, there was always a restaurant serving what came vaguely under the heading of Chinese food. This is, at least, light, adapted to the climate, and consequently less burdensome than the surfeit of stewed meats inevitably provided by the Grand Babylon hotels of the Far East.
The Grand Hotel des Ruines had had several lean years. It was said that one or two of the guests had been kidnapped. The necessity, until a few months before, of an armed escort, must have provided an element of drama not altogether unsuitable in a visit to Angkor. Now the visitors were beginning to come again, arriving in chartered planes from Siam, signing their names in the register which was coated as soon as opened with a layer of small, exhausted flies falling continually from the ceiling. Perking up, the management arranged conducted tours to the ruins. In the morning the hotel car went to Angkor Thom, in the afternoon it covered what was called the Little Circuit. The next morning it would be Angkor Thom again and in the afternoon Angkor Vat. You had to stay three days to be taken finally on a tour of the Grand Circuit. Naturally in the circumstances the hotel wanted to keep its guests as long as possible. And even Baedeker would not have found three days unreasonable for the visit to Angkor.
There were many remoter temples, such as the exquisite Banteay Srei, thirty kilometres away, which the bus did not reach, as it was doubtful whether the writ of Dap Chhuon ran in these distant parts. The forces of the tutelary bandit seemed to be concentrated in the immediate vicinity. There was a sports field under my window and every morning, soon after dawn, a party of Dap Chhuon’s men used to arrive for an hour’s PT. Against a background of goal posts, they failed to terrify. They were thin from the years spent under the greenwood tree and as they ‘knees-bent’ and ‘stretched’, each piratical rib could be counted. Beyond the playing-field and the gymnasts, was the forest, tawny and autumnal, from which in the far distance emerged the helmeted shapes of the three central towers of Angkor Vat.
* * *
The existence of Angkor was reported by sixteenth-century missionaries, although the ruins were not fully described until Mouhot’s visit in 1859. They are probably the most spectacular man-made remains in the world, and as no European could ever be expected to rest content with the comfortable attitude taken by the Cambodians who assured Mouhot that ‘they made themselves’, the details of their origins have provoked endless speculation and many learned volumes.
At its maximum extension at the end of the twelfth century, the Khmer Empire included, in addition to the present kingdom of Cambodia, parts of the Malay Peninsula, Burma, Siam and Cochin China, but for practical and metaphysical reasons the capital has always been in the vicinity of Angkor. There are important Khmer ruins scattered through the forests over a hundred miles radius. The principal monuments are the colossal mausoleum of Angkor Vat, the shell of the city of Angkor Thom, with its fantastic centre piece, the Bayon, and a few scattered temples and foundations; some pyramidical, but all built on a strictly rectangular plan and carefully oriented with doors facing the cardinal points. Between these are clear open spaces, since permanence was only desired for religious edifices and only those could be built of brick and stone. All these buildings were erected between the ninth and twelfth centuries.
Savants of the late nineteenth century have argued with compelling logic that Angkor Vat took three hundred years to build, although the figure generally accepted at the present time is nearer thirty. Divergences of opinion regarding the completion dates of other monuments ranged over several centuries, and there was a similarly fierce conflict of theory over the purposes of the buildings and the identity of the statuary. The arguments have been slowly resolved and many a dogma demolished by the periodical discovery of steles, on which the monarchs of those days have left a record not only of their achievements but of their motives. Thus Udayadityavarman II informs posterity that he built the Baphûon, which was then the centre of a city which predated Angkor Thom, ‘because he had remembered that the centre of the universe is marked by the mountain of Meru and it was appropriate that his capital should have a Meru in its centre’.
This statement presents one with a key to the whole situation. All Khmer building was governed by an extravagant symbolism. The first Khmer king, who, returning from Java, had thrown off the suzerainty of that kingdom and unified Cambodia under his rule, had promptly declared himself a god. Under the aspect of Siva he took the title of ‘Lord of the Universe’. He was obliged, therefore, to order his kingdom, or at least his capital, along the lines of an established precedent – provided in this case by Buddhist mythology. The Buddhist universe included a central mountain of Meru, which supported the heavens and was surrounded by an ocean, and finally a high wall of rocks which formed the barrier and enclosure of space. There was a lot more in it than this, but these were the reasonable limits to which the king’s symbolism could be pushed. He built his artificial hill, the wide moat round his city, and the wall. This probably helped to convince him that he really was a god. It was wishful thinking on a cosmic scale.
Yet there was a curious sense of dependence shown by these self-created divinities upon the observance of their cult by their successors and their subjects. It was a grotesque magnification of the belief underlying so many Eastern religions that the fate of the dead is in some way linked to the living, who must provide them with regular offerings if they are to remain prosperous and contented in the land of souls. This idea, lodged in the ruthlessly energetic mind of a Khmer king, was translated into action on a huge scale. The king erected temples and consecrated statues to his divinised parents while leaving behind him inscriptions which positively implore his successors to follow his example. His immortality, King Yaçovarman admits on one of his steles, depends upon the maintenance of the cult. Seen in this light these deities were not comparable to the unassailable gods of the ancient Mediterranean world. For a neglected and forgotten god-king passed into oblivion. He became no more than one of the great multitude of nameless and forgotten spirits for which the pious erect those tiny shrines outside their homes.
