A LOST CIVILISATION.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVI, Issue 20426, 30 November 1929, Page 8 (Supplement)

A LOST CIVILISATION.

ANGKOR THE MAGNIFICENT.

Deeply implanted in the mind of man is the instinct for exploration and discovery, for bringing forth from concealment what is hidden, whether it takes the shape of a childish game of hide-and-seek, the more sophisticated and gruesome form of the detection of crime, or, most romantic of all, the discovery of new lands or new facts about old lands. Certainly 110 mystery story ever devised by the magic pen of Corian Doyle or Edgar Wallace could equal in thrilling power the tale of tho finding of Angkor, the wonder city of tho vanished raco of Khmcrs, after it had been buried for five centuries in the ever-encroaching jungle of Cambodia. Sixty years ago Mouhot, a French naturalist, while exploring tho wilds of IndoChina, heard a tale told of a grcat_ city lost in the jungle, and, despite the timidity arid reluctance of his native guides, lie pressed ever deeper and deeper into the tiopical fastnesses, until lie himself almost began to lose faith and to fear that ho had been misled by a fairy tale. And he wrote in his diary: " Ifc is manifest that there has never boon any civilisation in this region. Tho jungle here is virgin—just as it was after God breathed upon the face of the waters. . . Native taboos, persisting probably through untold cycles of years, mado of this valley a region proscribed, and so the great cultures of the East—tho migrations of peoples and the missionary movements of tho intelligentsia—pasesd it by. If there aro cities in this wilderness, they must date back to some time before Adam."

Finding of the Lost City. So, almost bereft of hope and faith, Monhot pushed on in the quivering Cambodian heat, and, after threo nioro days of agonising and disheartening effort, '/suddenly, ahead of them, appeared a vast and awesome miracle. Five massive stone towers were rising dizzily into the molten sky. The carved roofs of a step-pyramid were shouldering their way out of the coconut palm. . . Mirage or reality—the most astounding spectacle that man had ever looked upon."

Such, then, is the fascinating story told by Robert J. Casey, in " Four Faces of Siva," of tho finding of the lost city of tho Khmers. In those days Angkor was in Siamese territory, but in 1907 it was ceded to France, and to-day it is possible to motor in a few hours from Saigon, the capital of French Indo-China,, along a broad and well-made road, until one reaches a comfortable hotel, upon tho outskirts of Angkor, from which one may explore not only the remains of a wailed city, which must at one time have housed more than a million people, but chiefly tho temple of Angkor Vat, the supreme architectural effort of this lost culture, and " probably the most stupendous undertaking attempted by man since the corner-stone was laid for the tower of Babel."

Thus the vague native legends proved to havo a basis in fact. The. lost city was found, but the riddle of construction and of tho disappearance of its inhabitants has not been solved completely up to tho present day. The Khmers seem to havo been a people of Hindu origin, reaching a total, perhaps, of 30,000.000, who, accompanied, probably, by a slavo population of even greater numbers than themselves, swept down from tho north, building roads as they went and laying out cities. Their engineering skill is perhaps the most remarkable feature of their work. Cement they dispensed with altogether, and relied entirely upon the placing of the masses of stone upon one another, while their method of hoisting huge blocks 'of stone weighing as much as 23 tons is another unsolved mystery. The Vanished Race.

Finally, these difficulties are all trifling in comparison with the mystery of the disappearance of the Khmers themselves. Their culture, amazing as it was, and lasting over a period, perhaps, roughly of nine centuries, seems to have made no impress upon their neighbours, while the people themselves vanished as completely and as mistifyingly as tho crew of the ill-fated Marie Celeste. Plague, in one of the terrible forms of Eastern pestilence, is suggested as one possible solution. Against this, there is the fact that all the metal has disappeared from the temple, and that clumsv efforts seem to have been made to prise the stones apart. This has led to the belief that the slave part of tho community may have risen against their masters and massacred them. Then, deprived of leadership, they themselves might well have, in their turn, been conquered by the jungle. The book is illustrated with excellent photographs, though, as the author says, no photograph can even faintly convey the senso of magic and mystery with which tho eye-witness gazes upon these stupendous relics of a lost civilisation.

" Four Faces o£ Siva," by Robert J Casey. (Harrnp.)