Dragon Apparent, page 24
So the king came in time to devote the whole of his efforts to the preservation of this shaky immortality. The royal megalomania reached its height with Jayavarman VII. Ta Prohm, built to house the image and the divine essence of the Queen mother and 260 attendant and lesser deities, required for its service 79,365 persons of whom about 5000 were priests. The gold plate used in this temple weighed five tons and the temple establishment lived upon the revenues of 3140 villages. The king’s obligations to his father gave rise five years later to the erection of Prah Khan. This time, according to the stele discovered in 1939, there were 430 minor divinities included with the old king – nobles who as a kind of promotion for meritorious services had been either granted apotheosis or raised posthumously to the divine status. The responsibility for the upkeep of this establishment fell upon 5324 villages, the total number of persons involved being 97,840. Among the dependencies of Prah Khan was the little sanctuary of Néak Pân, built upon one of those sharply rectangular artificial lakes the Khmers were so fond of digging out. This symbolised a lake situated, according to a Hindu legend, somewhere in the Himalayas, which was supposed to possess extraordinary purificatory powers. Its construction was no mere poetic conceit, but followed a formula by which it became, in essence, the original lake. In this way the Khmer king saved himself the kind of gigantic wild-goose chase sometimes undertaken by the Chinese Emperors in their searches for similar legendary sites.
These are the games of children, who by a slight imaginative effort can even transform inanimate objects into living ones; a broom into a horse. But the children’s games played by the Kings of Cambodia were backed by monstrous and freakish power. Néak Pân, of course, was a trifle for those days, probably not occupying more than 10,000 men for a mere three or four years.
But the king was not, and never could be satisfied. Hounded on by furious compulsions he reconstructed his capital in such a way that the Baphûon – microcosm of Meru – was no longer in the town’s geometrical centre. This called for another sacred mountain, a great extension of the moat and entirely new walls. After only ten years of his reign there were already 13,500 villages comprising 306,372 men at work on these projects. The new sacred mountain was the Bayon, the most singular of all the Angkor monuments. It was Jayavarman’s last work begun in about 1190, and it marked the height of the Khmer power and foreshadowed its end. From its towers sixty-four colossal faces of the king, now represented as one with the Buddha, smiled, with rather savage satisfaction, it seems, towards the four quarters of the kingdom. Even Pierre Loti, who knew nothing of the Bayon’s history, found it very sinister.
With inexorable willpower at the service of mania the Khmer kings called into being whole populations whose only ultimate function, whether directly or indirectly, was the furtherance of their insatiable cult. In the early period, the economic basis of this efflorescence was the inland sea of Tonlé Sap, close to which all the successive capitals had been situated and which contained, and still contains, so many fish that when in the dry season the waters sink to their low level, the oars of boatmen are impeded by them. The Tonlé Sap provided food for the whole populace through the exertions of a few fishermen, and the king saw to it that all the spare hours were occupied with profitable labour. An agricultural people, efficiently tilling fertile soil – and one is reminded of the pre-Columbian Mayans – can live fairly comfortably on an aggregate of forty or fifty days’ labour a year. Inevitably, however, some organising genius comes along to make sure that the spare three hundred days are occupied in impressive but largely wasteful undertakings.
With the flying start provided by the Tonlé Sap the kingdom was expanded in all directions, covered with rice-fields, nourished by a brilliant irrigational system and linked up by a network of roads, with elaborately equipped staging points providing shelter for the buffaloes and elephants used as beasts of transport, as well as their masters. The great building king, Jayavarman VII, in addition to his religious foundations and influenced perhaps by the fact that he was a leper, established one hundred and two hospitals. He did not omit to furnish on the great stele of Prah Khan the most detailed catalogue of the medicaments with which they were stocked. It was a huge piece of organisation, controlled finally by a vast machine of state, with its Domesday Books and its army of accountants, to keep track of the activities of every single man in the interests of the maximum production. One can be quite sure that there was a police force and that the minds of the young were carefully moulded by the priesthood to fit them for the efficient fulfilment of their duties. The Khmer Empire was nothing if not totalitarian.
A great deal of unnecessary mystery has been made about the downfall of the Khmers, followed by the abandonment of Angkor. It has often been attributed to spectacular Acts of God. The facts, simple enough, are related by the Chinese traveller Chou Ta-Kouan, who visited Angkor when its decadence was already well advanced, and when, partly because the sandstone quarries were exhausted, even the building mania had petered out. It seems that the Khmers, attacked in retaliation by the Siamese, had been obliged to apply the principles of total war. ‘They say,’ said Chou Ta-Kouan, ‘that in the war with the Siamese, all the people were forced to fight.’ One notes that Ta-Kouan speaks of compulsion, and suspects that if any were spared conscription it would have been those tens of thousands of temple servants who ministered to the royal cult. If the report is true that the Khmer army was several millions strong, it must have been by far the largest in the world of its day. But these peasants torn from their rice-fields and forced into uniform fought with little enthusiasm and the wars dragged on until final defeat.
In the meanwhile the irrigation systems were allowed to fall into ruin and the rice-fields on which the enormous, swollen population depended, quickly reverted to forests. The highly productive paddy-field system was progressively abandoned in favour of that present scourge of Indo-China, rice-cultivation in ‘rays’, which involves the annual burning of the forest. It was a method, since it occupies the minimum of labour, which must have been tempting to a nation at war, but results are poor and decrease rapidly, and ultimately it results in the sterilisation and exhaustion of the soil. The process of decline, once under way, could not be halted, and defeat was made absolute by the victor’s introduction of the primitive apostolic Buddhism of the ‘Little Vehicle’, the religion of withdrawal, of renunciation, of tranquillity; which was so utterly destructive to the perverted power-cults of the divine kings. It was the subtlest of Carthaginian Peaces.
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It is possible that the ruins of Angkor are in many ways more impressive than the city itself was in its heyday. Time has wrought wonders with the sandstone, which must have been garish enough when freshly cut. And vandalism and the flailings of sun and rain have done much to mute that excessive symmetry, that all-pervading symbolism, that repetitiousness which I find so irritating in far-Eastern art. There is evidence of an obsession with the magic of numbers and of the dignifying, under artistic forms, of primeval superstitions. One feels that the Khmer must have reasoned that if it was a good thing to erect one statue to Vishnu or of a Devata, then it was fifty times better to have fifty of them. Adepts of magic never seem to be convinced that their magical practices are completely and finally effective. The causeway which leads into Angkor Vat is, or was, flanked at exactly spaced intervals by pairs of nagas – seven-headed serpents. I do not find seven-headed serpents particularly decorative, and much prefer the lions couchants of which there are many hundreds. However, they represent the serpent beneath which Buddha sheltered. They are, therefore, in essence, protective; and it is necessary to have as many as can be fitted in. I think that it is an aesthetic advantage that the majority of them have been broken and are missing.
The causeway conducts one smack into the centre of the whole architectural composition. It could not be otherwise, since all considerations had to be subordinated to that of symbolism; and to have built the formal approach from any angle but this would have been to risk throwing the universe, or at least the kingdom, out of balance, by sympathetic magic. Angkor Vat, however, is best viewed from across the water from one of the corners of the moat. Immediately the tyranny of the matched-pair is broken. The towers, many-tiered like the head-dress of an Indian dancer, are re-grouped in majestic nonchalance. The Vat gathers itself from the lake, raised on a long, low-lying portico. Above that the unbroken lines of the roofs rise one above the other, to be capped by the towers, which are somehow jaunty in spite of the sad harmony of the old, disintegrated colours. A lotus-broken reflection is carried on the mildewed waters of the lake.
And all the monuments of ancient Greece could be enclosed in this one building.
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Within the Vat miles of goddesses and heavenly dancing girls, dehumanised and amiable, posture in bas-relief round the gallery walls. They are all exactly of the same height and physique, hands and arms frozen in one of the dozen or so correct gestures. Since Khmer art is never erotic – and one remembers de la Rochefoucauld’s ‘where ambition has entered love rarely returns’ – they do not exhibit the development of breast and hip which is so characteristic of similar figures in Indian art.
The triumphant existence is portrayed in a series of set poses. The king or god out hunting adopts the wooden pose of a dancer to shoot a deer – in itself depicted with admirable realism. Victorious princes and warriors parade for the ascent to heaven (success being identified with virtue), heads overlapping in three-quarters profile, left hands on breasts and right on hips. Nothing, however, could be more realistic than the treatment of the defeated and the damned, who are naturally consigned to hell. The postures of these bodies being trodden underfoot by horsemen and torn by wild beasts have been observed and carefully copied from the life. Only the devils are permitted a hieratic stance.
But it is when the artist is left to his own devices in his treatment of the ordinary citizen, and his everyday life, that he shows us what he can do. Gone is the processional dignity and the frigid smile of power. The peasants and fisher-folk are shown as thick-limbed and grotesque, with coarse, clownish faces. With gleeful licence the artist depicts their buffoonery as they haggle over tripes in the market, slaughter their pigs, smirkingly watch a cockfight or visit a palmist. These are the trollish faces that medieval church-sculptors carved on almost invisible bosses as a relief from the insipidity of righteousness. The vulgar of Angkor are shown taking their pleasure on the Tonlé Sap – capering on the deck of a becalmed junk like day-trippers on the river boat to Southend; or hunched over a game of chess. With lower-class respectability most of them have put on short jackets for the occasion. Meanwhile a boatload of the better people passes, all seated with decorum, fashionable in their semi-nudity, facing one way, and smiling with the refined beatitude induced by the knowledge that sooner or later they will appear in the honours list as minor gods.
Cormorants and herons are shown competing with the fishermen for their catches while crocodiles menace them from the water. The Khmers made much decorative use of flora and fauna. The anarchic quality of trees is subdued and subjected to a Byzantine stylisation, but the animals that lurk among them are seen in a lively naturalism comparable to palaeolithic cave-art. And the intention that animated cave-art is roughly identical with that which produced these miles of bas-reliefs. Their object was magical and their decorative effect quite incidental. Angkor Vat was the funerary temple of Suryavaranam II divinised under the aspect of Vishnu, and this world in sculpture replaced the great funeral holocausts of earlier days. That aesthetic pleasure had no bearing upon the question is proved by the fact that many scenes have been sculpted with scrupulous care in places where they are quite invisible, or even – as in the case of the Bayon – on the building’s subterranean foundations.
Ta Prohm, which Jayavarman VII built to house his mother’s cult, and which occupied the working lives of 79,000 of his subjects, was scheduled to detain the thirty tourists from Siam for one hour.
The temple was built on flat land and offers none of the spectacular vistas of Angkor Vat, nor the architectural surprises of Bayon. It has therefore been maintained as a kind of reserve where the prodigious conflict between the ruins and the jungle is permitted to continue under control. The spectacle of this monstrous vegetable aggression is a favourite with most visitors to the ruins.
Released from the hotel bus, the thirty tourists plunged forward at a semi trot into the caverns of this rectangular labyrinth. For a few moments their pattering footsteps echoed down the flagstoned passages and then they were absorbed in the silence of those dim, shattered vastnesses, and I saw none of them again until it was time to return.
Ta Prohm is an arrested cataclysm. In its invasion, the forest has not broken through it, but poured over the top, and the many courtyards have become cavities and holes in the forest’s false bottom. In places the cloisters are quite dark, where the windows have been covered with subsidences of earth, humus and trees. Otherwise they are illuminated with an aquarium light, filtered through screens of roots and green lianas.
Entering the courtyards one comes into a new kind of vegetable world; not the one of branches and leaves with which one is familiar, but that of roots. Ta Prohm is an exhibition of the mysterious subterranean life of plants, of which it offers an infinite variety of cross-sections. Huge trees have seeded themselves on the roofs of the squat towers and their soaring trunks are obscured from sight; but here one can study in comfort the drama of those secret and conspiratorial activities that labour to support their titanic growth.
Down, then, come the roots, pale, swelling and muscular. There is a grossness in the sight; a recollection of sagging ropes of lava, a parody of the bulging limbs of circus-freaks, shamefully revealed. The approach is exploratory. The roots follow the outlines of the masonry; duplicating pilasters and pillars; never seeking to bridge a gap and always preserving a smooth living contact with the stone surfaces; burlesquing in their ropy bulk the architectural motives which they cover. It is only long after the hold has been secured that the deadly wrestling bout begins. As the roots swell their grip contracts. Whole blocks of masonry are torn out, and brandished in midair. A section of wall is cracked, disjointed and held in suspension like a gibbeted corpse; prevented by the roots’ embrace from disintegration. There are roots which appear suddenly, bursting through the flagstones to wander twenty yards like huge boa constrictors, before plunging through the up-ended stones to earth again. An isolated tower bears on its summit a complete sample of the virgin jungle, with ferns and underbrush and a giant fig tree which screens the faces of the statuary with its liana-curtains, and discards a halo of parakeets at the approach of footsteps.
The temple is incompletely cleared. One wanders on down identical passages or through identical courtyards – it is as repetitive in plan as a sectional bookcase – and then suddenly there is a thirty-foot wall, a tidal wave of vegetation, in which the heavenly dancers drown with decorous gestures.
But there are still some signs of life in the temples and mausolea of Angkor, besides the sinister and stinking presence of myriads of bats. The people now come to these once exclusive places and burn incense-sticks before the Buddhas, which probably started their existence as idealised representations of various members of the Khmer aristocracy. Parties of bonzes stroll through the ruins. They carry the inevitable yellow parasols and sometimes box cameras with which they photograph each other, for the benefit of their friends back at the monastery, against some particularly sacrosanct background, such as the corpulent shape of a man who had once made a corner in fish.
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My last daylight hours at Angkor were spent by the lake of Sram Srang. The Khmers were always digging out huge artificial lakes, which, if the preliminary surveying had been correctly carried out, and temples and statues were erected according to accepted precedents round their margins or on a centre island, could always be declared to possess purificatory qualities. For this reason Sram Srang was supposed to have been a favourite royal bathing place, with its grand approach, its majestic flight of steps, flanked with mythical animals, and its golden barges.
Now the lions were faceless, and the nagas had lost most of their heads. The severe rectangularity of old had been softened by subsidences of the banks, which had solidified into little peninsulas on which trees were growing. Buffaloes stood motionless in the virtuous water with only their heads showing. Sometimes even their heads were withdrawn for a few moments below the surface. Giant kingfishers flashed past, linked to their reflections; twin shooting stars in a grey-green firmament. Until forty years ago the Cambodians exported these birds’ skins to China where they were made into mandarins’ jackets, taking in exchange pottery and silk. And then the vogue for European goods grew up, and the industry languished.
As if from nowhere a group of boys materialised. They were selling crossbows. They were better looking and their physique was better than either the nobles or the commons on the Angkor Vat bas-reliefs, but six hundred years ago they would have worked twelve hours a day, and now they probably worked an hour a week, if at all. Three or four of them always lurked forlornly in the vicinity of the various ruins in the outrageous hope of one day selling a crossbow to a tourist.
