ANGKOR IN CAMBODIA

Manawatu Times, Issue 6848, 1 March 1929, Page 11

ANGKOR IN CAMBODIA

And at last towards Angkor the Beautiful and Indescribable. Of the three places I most wanted to see Angkor is that to which I should best like to return. ... It is truly astonishing to how few people in England, Angkor is even a name. Is it generalising too much to say that in the Far East the British travel for profit rather than pleasure, and that Malaya is, roughly speaking, the tourist’s limit? Those countries which interest us materially are unavoidably those of whose beauties we know most. But never to have heard of Angkor! To forestall a frequent question—Cambodia is a French protectorate north of Indo-Qhina and south-east of Siam, and Angkor is a stretch of jungle north-east of the great lake Ton-le Sap, strewn with wonderful remains covering much ground and many centuries, roughly from the fifth to the thirteenth. Gorgeous temples, chiefly gateways too, and terraces, moats and fortifications, everything that was built of stone the jungle has both destroyed and preserved. Here clearly are the remains of a great civilisation of high artistic accomplishment. ... Gorgeous as are the temples, it is their setting above all which makes Angkor unique. There is but one hill and that artificial, and, of course, temple crowned, but from its top, except for Angkor Wat and the long line of its moat close below, the view is across milo upon mile of tree-tops; and such trees! It was there that I first met the Giant Diptocarp, who stands head and shoulders above the other inhabitants of a tropical forest, none small, shaking himself free of them by dropping his lower branches and growing straight as a roeket till he can spread himself uncrowded in upper air. . . In one of the outlying temples—Greater Angkor covers an immense tract of jungle^—wore the biggest troc3 I have seen at all, the upper parts of their roots consisting of buttresses such as are common to many tropical trees, but of enormous size, and the roots themselves running for yards along the surface of the ground, thick as a well-grown oak. ...

Not only were thero trees, but flowers. It was nearly Christmas, and cold weather—comparatively. In the few other places where luck has led me to the forest, it has been said that only in the hot weather could I hope to see flowers. But here there was at least one creeper in full flowering. Less unlike ageratum than anything else I know, the blosom, insignificant, but with a honey scent that filled the air, lay like a pale mauve mist on tho treetops as they lay below us on tho summit of Phnom Bakeng. ■ Blossoming out of time here and there were other things too, just to show what that land could do and it would!-—Rachel Wheatoroft, in “Siam and Cambodia in Pen and Pastel.”