THE KING’S EMPIRE

Bay of Plenty Times, Volume LXV, Issue 12306, 21 April 1937, Page 2

THE KING’S EMPIRE

INDIA—A MIGHTY WONDER OP THE PAST May we —while we are fravelling through India—turn aside to (ha 20 square miles of ruins at Angkor in French Indo-China? Angkor-Vat (vat is Siamese word for temple) is the greatest of Khmer city. It is seen by the (ravelinacross a moat far wider than the Thames at London Bridge, covered with water lilies. Looking from the main gateway he sees on Urn other side of the causeway, with i s balustrade of gigantic stone cobras, the mass of the building, with its huge quadruple towers like a phantom basilica. No other building in the world compares with it for mysterious magnificence. It imposes itself on the sight not so much by its 'beauty as by its depressing immensity. Crushing masses of sculptured rocks, stone carved towers and stairways lording swiftly skywards, bewilder the eye and mind by their profusion. Ris not simple, like ■ Western- architecture; it has exuberance and complications of Hindu art, so that both in mass and detail it staggers the beholder. There are walls of endless carvings and bas-reliefs, warriors by the thousand, caparisoned elephants, war chariots, and interminable vistas fleeing away everywhere from the gaze like objects in an endless gal'ery of a museum. Description fails one. We can only record that there are two miles of gallery in the temple and 26,000 feet of bas-reliefs cliselled in stone. The archaeologists have numbered and examined them. Our task is easier. We need not oven climb the cascades of stone between recumbent lions and sacred bulls and seven-headed cobras, to the dizzy towers of this mountain of a tempi®We can only marvel at it burning In the silence and tropic heat, with the jungle waiting to creep hack ami cover it, should men relax their-ef-forts and allow, the curUiu of the Past to fall again,.