invasion by the West; and thus I came, at the close of day, to the foot of the stairway that leads up the face of the Phnom, to the pagoda which crowns it.
To the north, south and west, and east, across the waters of the Mekong, the country lay spread out in an endless flat, clothed by the dingy greens and blues and blacks of its vegetation; but immediately around the Phnom were the lawns and shrubberies of the trim public gardens, set with iron cages, in which were pent a few leopards and many woebegone wildfowl.
And to me, these things—the pagoda, the wild creatures of the forest, the aged king yonder in his palace, the neat gardens, the cages, the sentry-guarded French Residency on the river's brink—were symbols—symbols of the Great Captivity.
Immediately before me, a long flight of brick steps ran upward between twin balustrades, fashioned in the likeness of the seven-headed cobra of the Brahmans. The rounded bodies of these monsters formed the balustrades themselves; the seven up-reared heads, fanning out into a single menacing cobra-hood, rose one on each side of the stairway's base; the pointed tails writhed into the air, against the sky, high above me.
