ANGKOR

Temple and town and network of dim and forgotten shrines, it represents a culture that must have been far in advance of anything coeval with it and a power that must have been virtually irresistible even in Asia, where men at arms were plentiful and warfare was a favored business.

But the culture died and the men who had built it disappeared, and for hundreds of years the forests of banyan and bamboo hid from the eyes and memory of the world what had been a metropolis of a million inhabitants.

Two generations ago a French naturalist broke through the wall of jungle in a search for specimens of tropical life and came upon a spectacle such as the slaves of the lamp might have contrived for Aladdin. Before him, in the quivering silence, rose the five towers of a vast step pyramid, a stone tapestry representative of an art and architecture like nothing else within the ken of man.

A moated wall surrounded it and a cloistered gate opened upon a causeway that led to its rocketing staircases; and, for all that jungle growths were close about its lower stage and odd clumps of verdure grew from its arched roofs, it seemed that life had been in its shadowy galleries only a moment ago. The temple was virtually intact.

The astonished visitor looked about for the ashes of altar fires and stood listening for the footsteps of returning priests. It seemed incredible that a people could have evolved a civilization such as that typified by the great temple and then have vanished without any of their neighbors hearing of it.

But there were no human beings in the empty halls, nor was there trace of man save in the ruin of his works in the walled city to the north.

It is now more than sixty years since the stunned eyes of Mouhot, the naturalist, looked upon the magnificent heights of Angkor-more than sixty years since the greatest detective story in the history of the world was laid out with its million stony clews to puzzle the savants. Today, with its principal remains classified and ticketed, its inscriptions translated, and its monuments lifted out of the jungle, Angkor is still the vast and silent mystery that it was in the beginning.

The world knows more about it now. Splendid automobile roads, cut through what was once a thicket of bamboo and is now an endless rice field, bring the traveler, on regular schedule and with little personal discomfort, from Saigon, at the foot of Asia, to the bungalow on the edge of the Angkor moat, in a few hours. Yearly hundreds of visitors from all parts of the world are seeking out this odd corner and carrying away with them amazed reports that will lure other hundreds.

And yet, were it not for the fact that these tremendous zikkurats remain much as they were when they were first built, defiant of time and weather. by the Tonle Sap (Great Lake), the incredible tale of the civilization that built them and vanished would rank as it did in Mouhot's time, as a none-too-cleverly-constructed myth.

But the monuments are there and no mere shutting of the eyes will dispose of them: Angkor Thom, a walled city within whose metropolitan area at one time must have lived more people than were to be found in the Rome of Augustus or the Carthage of Hannibal; and Angkor Vat, supreme architectural effort of this strange culture, not only the most grandiose temple…"