THE DOWNFALL OF THE GODS
CHAPTER I
THE REVELATION
Over Angkor, the capital of the mighty Khmer Empire, the hush of afternoon had fallen. All nature, spent by the long hours of heat, lay prostrate, awaiting breathlessly the first touch of coolness that would come with the setting of the sun. Only man—the tireless fashioner of beautiful, useless things—stared through the glare under burdened eyelids and, at the ruthless behest of man, still toiled and sweated in the dust.
Beneath the drenching flood of sunlight pouring down out of the colourless sky, Angkor Wat stood forth in all its majesty, dominating the featureless landscape.
From the margin of the Great Lake an immense expanse of alluvial flat spread inshore as far as the eye could carry. The turbid waters and the jungle-smothered land merged imperceptibly the one into the other; little creeks and inlets clinging to the ragged skirts of the vegetation, and mud-stained amphibious trees wading out into the shallows, or standing ankle-deep in the slime and ooze.
The forest—an endless sea of tree-tops—inundated the plain, the sombre waves of colour fading as they receded to melt at last into a misty blur of delicate, elusive tints low down about the fretted skyline. Here and there the sombre monotony of the jungle was relieved by wide washes of vivid green, where the rice stood ripening in the irrigated fields; and in places the surface of the earth was stained, as by some parasitic growth, by the dusty greys and browns of thatch, and the raw reds of tiled roofs visible beneath their canopies of palm-fronds. For the rest the forest—forest indescribably dingy, squalid, and melancholy—draped itself like a death-cloth over the face of the plain.
Nowhere else in all the wondrous fairyland of tropical Asia could a landscape be found more dreary to the eye, more depressing to the spirit, than this spot on the shores of Tonlé-Sap in the lower valley of the Mekong. The sparse hillocks served but to emphasise its flatness. The very trees of the jungle had the air of having slunk out of the muddy waters and of huddling together shamefully, like a host of woebegone waifs, on the parched and thirsty soil. In their colouring there was no richness; and the thin heat-haze that shimmered so restlessly above them seemed an emanation from the dust with which they were powdered. Even the brilliant green of the rice-fields failed to strike a note of gaiety amid the dull blues and blacks that enveloped and swamped it. Though Nature had worked unnumbered miracles, clothing the earth with vegetation and filling with teeming life the water and the land, she seemed, in some obscure fashion, to suffer here an eternal defeat. The featureless aspect of the plain and the monotony of sad colouring combined to belittle its immensity. They made of it a thing paltry and mean—a mere background fitted only to throw into added prominence the Titanic works of man.
Of these the most stupendous was the great Wat.
From the day, more than five hundred years earlier, when the Brahman conquerors had stayed at last their wandering feet, and here, in this wilderness of Kambodia, had elected to consolidate their empire, they had wrought strenuously for their own honour and aggrandisement, but more strenuously still for the glory and the propitiation of the gods of their worship.
Quitting the banks of the sacred Ganges in about the fifth century of our era, and striking out recklessly into the Unknown, they had driven irresistibly forward across the great peninsula of Further India, fiery and impetuous as some tremendous conflagration that licks up in its passage all with which it meets. They had poured down through Assam and Manipur; had invaded, ravaged, and abandoned the gracious garden-lands of Asia, which to-day are Burma and northern Siam; had subdued, spoiled, and enslaved its peoples, and had lashed whole populations to their victorious chariot-wheels. Nor, while the force of the inexplicable impulse that goaded them to wander remained unexpended, had any wealth or charm or natural beauty of the lands they traversed and ruined prevailed to turn or stay them; yet, in the end, like some mighty river that loses itself ingloriously amid stagnant marshes, they had found a final resting-place among the dreary forests of Kambodia, and on the shores of its mud-stained lake.
But the genius and the energy which had borne them triumphantly across half a continent, still demanded outlets; and the men who had conquered and destroyed upon so gigantic a scale set themselves now, no less greatly, to fashion and to create.
From the comfortless forest-lands they carved out for themselves an immense empire, and peopled it with the hosts they had reduced to bondage. They exacted tribute and allegiance from more than half the princes who ruled the petty kingdoms of south-eastern Asia. They converted the jungles about the margin of their lake into irrigated fields, whence annually they might draw enormous supplies of grain. They gutted the earth of its mineral wealth as far south as the Golden Chersonese. They made Angkor Thom—their capital city—the centre of a world. Thither many a crestfallen embassy made humiliating pilgrimage. To its loud mart flocked the merchants of India and of China, and the spice-bearers from the rich islands of the southern seas. A place dedicated beyond all others to the service of the ancient gods, it attracted the saintly and the learned of many Hindu lands. It became the chosen resort of the scholarly and the skilful, of the pandit and the artisan, of the cunning carver of wood and stone. In its crowded treasuries the Brahmans had accumulated all the wealth that greed and tyranny could clutch, that ingenuity could make accessible, that the patient toil of thousands could be forced to produce, until Angkor had become like the unnaturally inflated limb of one sick of elephantiasis, into which had drained all the strength and all the nutriment that should have maintained the whole shrunken body.
Always, too, the Brahmans—the twice-born demigods—had achieved their successes at the expense of the folk they ruled. They had been the brain—the guiding, inspiring, subduing influence. The thews and sinews had been supplied by the low-caste peoples who served and worshipped them, to whose lot had fallen ever the heat and the burden of the day, the unending travail, the labour unto death.
For in the universal belief in their divinity, abode the power of the Brahmans—a power that enslaved the souls of low-caste men. These latter, descendants of the conquered peoples, raised awed eyes from the dust in adoration of the priest-princes, at whose bidding they toiled, and who ordered for them their lives. They existed only in the shadow cast upon the earth by these demigods who, to them, were a divine mystery made manifest to human sight. By serving, obeying, and honouring them, thus, and thus only, might they do distant and vicarious reverence to the Shining Ones and so, acquiring merit, might win at last, in some yet far-off incarnation, to more honourable estate. The supreme patience, which is the very soul of Asia—the patience which so unwearyingly awaits the fulfilment of a promise vain and remote-steeled them to endure. Wherefore, like cattle, they bowed unresisting necks to the Brahman's yoke, and their backs to ever-increasing burdens.
And the burdens increased apace.
The people prostrated themselves in adoration before the demigods who ruled them; what time the demigods themselves rested not from their frantic efforts to propitiate the Deities from whom their divinity was derived.
Ere ever the straggling mass of wooden buildings with roofs of thatch and tiles—which was their capital city—had taken form, already they had begun to construct, in honour of the High Gods, temples of enduring stone. One by one 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.
The Wat, cruel and inexorable as Fate, had bounded and dominated the lives of thousands. To the men of Angkor—the casteless ones dedicated to its service—it had a monstrous personality of its own. It was eternal. It had always been there, claiming the strength and vigour of their manhood, grinding them slowly and mercilessly back into the dust whence they had emerged. Men, whose fathers and grandfathers had grown grey in its slavery, had been born beneath the shadow that it cast; had attained to maturity and had decayed with age, still spending themselves in labour upon it; and had been carried to the burning-ghat under a shadow imperceptibly lengthened. It brooded over their imaginations, menacing and insatiable. It paralysed their thought. They were blind to the beauty of the marvel at which they wrought. They knew only the measure of the toil and pain which were the heavy price of it. They looked at it with eyes sad and hopeless, spoke of it furtively in fearful whispers.
Now, in the hush of afternoon, the Wat stood forth in all the glory of its symmetry, dwarfing the landscape.
Though much remained to be done, the labour of three centuries had sufficed to give full shape to the vision of the dreamer who designed it. The immense outer cloister, some three miles in girth, was completed only on two flanks. Of the four flagged and raised causeways, destined to lead to the threshold of the Wat from each of the cardinal points of the compass, only one, that from the west, had been constructed in its entirety; and in the temple itself, many stones still awaited the chisel of the sculptor. But the five immense conical domes, rugged with external carving and ornamentation, soared triumphantly into the pale sky; and the eye was led up to them, from the basic platform with its noble stairways, by the sculptured roofs of two tiers of cloisters grouped around the great, cliff-like mass of solid masonry that supported the portals and courts and shrines of the upper temple. And the colour of it was wonderful. Grey for the most part—every tint and shade of grey—golden greys where the sunlight smote the stones; silver greys in the lighter shadows; deeper greys, merging into blues and purples and blacks, where the shadows were heavy; and ruddy browns with violet tints in them where the lichen had rusted the stones.
The sheer vastness of it, in design and execution, reduced all that surrounded it to utter insignificance; and the ant-like men who swarmed, toiling about it, were lost in its immensity, just as the faint clash and tinkle of their tools was swallowed up by the heavy stillness of the afternoon.
On the brink of the great moat at the spot where, on the east, it skirted the limits of the sacred precincts, a small, nearly naked boy was seated, shaken by sobs.
Behind him the forest crept up almost to the edge of the water, and before him rose the Wat, outlined sharply against the sky, and casting a shadow that, enveloping him, traced a huddle of grotesque shapes against the serried ranks of trunks and branches. Between the child and the threshold of the temple lay the moat, placid and shining as a shield of bronze, reflecting with startling vividness the inverted cones and curiously wrought gables of the topmost shrines; and beyond it again was an open space, grown upon sparsely by grass and weed and underwood, and littered with big fragments of grey sandstone. No work was going forward on this side of the building, and the boy was utterly alone, with the mysterious, still forest, lapped in slumber, behind him, and the immense, silent bulk of the Wat rising in front to face and overshadow him.
He was a daintily fashioned little creature, and the skin of his body was an even, pale brown, without spot or blemish. His head, small and shapely, set erect upon the slender column of his throat, was covered by a shock of fine, black hair, that hung curtain-wise across his brows, about his ears, and to the nape of his neck. His forehead was high and cleanly cut, his nose straight with slightly drooping nostrils, his cheek-bones rather prominent, his chin firm and beautifully modelled, and the thin lips pouted prettily. His hands and feet were at once strong and delicate, though the palms of the former were thick with callosities, and the soles of the latter horny with use.
But the most arresting feature of the child were his eyes. They were large and very dark, full of dreams and shadows, and they looked out from under heavily marked eyebrows, black as his hair. They gave to him, at all times, an air of solemn, unchildlike wisdom, and at this moment they were full of trouble and swimming in tears.
The actual cause of his grief was felt rather than realised. He had come hither, seeking solitude and refuge, from his parents' hut, and shaken to the very depths of his being by the storm of elemental passions which of a sudden had burst above his head. Dimly he understood that he, in some inexplicable fashion, had been used as a missile in the fray, from the din of which he had escaped.
There had been shrill word-battle between his mother and a neighbour, over a matter of a broken cooking-pot—warfare that dredged up from the slime of two angry women's souls vile thoughts, and viler words in which to clothe them. Without warning, the panic-stricken little boy had found himself in the heart of an emotional cataclysm whose fury tortured his nerves, while the very intensity of his distress numbed and paralysed his understanding.
He had fled—pursued by he knew not what, phantoms of horror and suggestion—and following some obscure primordial instinct, had headed for the forest; and now, by the edge of the moat, he had thrown himself down in the shade, to recover his breath, and still the frantic beating of his heart.
His mother had always been to him a creature vaguely mysterious. Sometimes, when he and she were alone together, she would suddenly fling soft arms around him and draw his head down against her breasts-bruising him with her violence, it might be—while she crooned over him with words of extravagant affection. But when the man, his father, was at hand—home from the quarries or the rice-fields—her spasmodic love seemed instantly to evaporate, leaving her the cold, silent, passionless drudge of every day.
Childlike, he had never spoken to her or to others of these strange outbursts of a love that seemed to have in it something at once fierce, hungry, and ashamed; but often as he sat watching her, busied over household tasks, or emitting monosyllabic replies to the discontented grumblings of her man, their master, he would fall to wondering whether his memory and his imagination were not playing the cheat, whether, in truth, this immobile woman was one with the raving, passion-torn creature who on occasion usurped her place.
And as he had grown older, and his features had begun to emerge from the rounded shapelessness of childhood into their present clean-cut beauty, his mother's carefully concealed love and adoration of him had become more intense, their manifestations more frequent; what time, the open distaste for him, which his father had always evinced, had grown more and more marked. Little by little, and so gradually that he knew not when the understanding of these things first dawned upon him, it had been borne in upon his mind that he occupied in the household a place apart, an alien place; that his two small, snub-nosed, broad-faced brethren, who followed him like dogs, were as unlike him in mind as in body; that his mother loved him above all things, but with an affection which she dared not show in the presence of others; that his father hated him. He gave back hate for hate.
Vaguely all these memories were present with him now, as he sat, sobbing and shaken, on the grass by the moat's brink; and nebulous as a mist, the conviction that they had some intimate connection with the tumult from which he had fled, stole up and enveloped him. Certain words and phrases which had poured through the lips of the woman while she abused his mother—words which had lost themselves amid the excitement and the terrors with which the quarrel had smitten him—recurred now to his mind. Many of them still were meaningless to the child; but through the foul murk of them an idea seemed to loom. The mother who had borne him, and whom for all her waywardness he loved, was a wanton, and he a bastard. More. She was mocked for pride—pride in her sin—pride in him, who was the flaming badge of it.
The horror of this thought, and of the recollection of his mother's face distorted by a passionate despair, as of some wild beast brought to bay, shook him with a fresh tremor; and seizing his head between his hands, and resting his elbows on his knees, he broke into a renewed burst of sobs.
The moat was at his feet, and his face was bent above it; and as he stared downward at his reflection mirrored there, by the still water, a fateful secret was revealed.
The afternoon was waning, and the jungle was beginning to stir in the heavy sleep in which, during all the long, hot hours of the day it had been lapped. It was as though, with faint rustlings, the warm earth was stretching its limbs, very languidly, ere it awoke. Somewhere, far off, a woodpecker was tapping. From homing bees, their hives high in the tree-tops, there came a droning hum that was like a delicate background to the forest silence. A flock of paroquets burst out of the woodland, circled, flashing like a kaleidoscope above the moat, and instantly was gone. A big blue kingfisher flew headlong down the bank, sounding his discordant note. In the forest close at hand arose for a moment a little flirt of feathers, and a cicada overhead broke abruptly into his strident love-song. Then once more the hush fell heavily; and through the silence, the water, lapping about the feet of the sacred places, whispered to the gazing boy its tremendous revelation.