ANGKOR IN CAMBODIA.

Shannon News, 12 April 1929, Page 4

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 tthat Malaya ii, roughly speaking, the tourist’s lfm‘Meditation’; 9.37, humour by Mr. it? Those countries which interest us materially are unavoidably those ot whose beauties we know most. Bu never to have heard of Angkor! To forestall a frequent question—Cambodia is a- French jjrotectorate north of

rndo-China 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 thir-

teenth. Gorgeous temples, chiefly gateways too, and terraces, moats and fortifications, everything that was built of stone the jungle has botih destroyed and. preserved. Here clearly are the remains of a great civilisation of high artistic accomplishment. ... Gorgeous as are the temples, it is

their sotting above all which makes Angkor unique. There is but one hill arc! that artificial, and, of course, temple crowned, but froffi its top, except for Angkor Wat and the long line of its moat close below, the view is across mile upon mile of tree-teps; and such trees! It was there that I first met the Giant Diptoearp, 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 rocket till he can spread himself uncrowded in upper air. . . In one of the outlying temples—Greater covers an immense tract of jungle—were the biggest trees 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 cak. . . . Not only were there trees, but. flowers. It was nearly Christmas, and

cold weather—comparatively. In the few other places where luck lias 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. Lcs„ 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 the treetops as they lay below us on the 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! —Eachel Wheateroft, in “Siam and Cambodia in Pen and Pastel.”