the thirty shrines of Tha Phrom had come into being, with their domes and columns and labyrinthine cloisters, decked with delicate sculpture. Every hillock in the plain had been crowned by its sacred edifice; and from these little, perfect buildings the Brahmans had passed on to greater and greater achievements. The Ba Phun and the Ba Yon—the two splendid sanctuaries or Angkor Thom—had in turn been designed and executed; and each successive effort of the Brahmans' genius had displayed ever widening conceptions, a more scornful contempt of difficulty, a more complete obsession by the spell of the magnificent and the grandiose, and a more lavish and wanton prodigality of human toil. Drunken with power, indifferent to the needs or the sufferings of their people, goaded onward by a tremendous and augmenting ambition, and urged, moreover, to still greater efforts by their awful fear of the Gods, the Brahmans, through the centuries, had piled monolith on monolith, carving and fashioning them wonderfully, and still had found their fierce lust for architectural achievement unappeased; till, in the fulness of time, the vast scheme of Angkor Wat had burst, in all the splendour of its inspiration, upon the imaginations of these dreamers in stone.
Now, during three hundred years, men had laboured ceaselessly in bitter travail, under the pitiless sun-glare, to give that idea form; but the end of their toiling was not yet.
