National Geographic: Glories Of Angkor Page #4

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and made him gloomy about

Mouhot's final push to the lost city.

Do you know where you're going?

The rains have begun and you are

going to almost certain death,

or will at least catch a fever,

which will be followed by years of

languor and suffering.

May God be with the poor traveler!

Mohout said he'd abide by God's will

but was going nonetheless.

After another leg of his river

journey

he reached a landmark he knew

only from legend

- the Ton LeSap Lake,

and marveled as the shorelines

grew apart by some five miles.

By now it'd been more than a year

since Mouhot had dined in

Bangkok's Royal Palace.

Rough travel had left him

ill-prepared

for what he was about to see,

a vision few Europeans had shared.

The lost city of Angkor was not a

rumor, but overwhelmingly real.

There are ruins of such grandeur,

remains of structures

which must have been raised at

such an immense cost of labor,

that at the first view, one is filled

with profound admiration,

and cannot but ask what has

become of this powerful race,

so civilized, so enlightened, the

authors of these gigantic works!

He came looking for insects,

came looking for flora, fauna,

new species.

He didn't come looking for

Angkor but he found it

and I think if any of us who may

have stumbled on Angkor as he did

would have been excited.

But whether we could have

recorded it in such detail

with such precision as Henri

Mouhot did is unlikely.

One of these temples... a rival to

that of Solomon,

and erected by some ancient

Michelangelo -

might take an honorable place beside

our most beautiful buildings.

It's grander than anything left to us

by Greece or Rome!

The natives enlightened the

stunned Mouhot-

it's the work of angels, they

said, or giants.

It was built by a magician-king.

It built itself.

Mouhot was not an archeologist,

nor an art historian, nor could he

read the Sanskrit engravings

that adorned the monuments of

Angkor.

Yet he was an illustrator.

With his customary zeal

he set out to sketch the most

magnificent

of the lost city's some 1,000 temples,

and describe them inch-by-inch.

The west side the gallery is

supported

by two rows of square columns,

on the east, blank windows have

been let into the wall,

with balconies of twisted columns

fourteen centimeters in diameter...

In the center of the causeway are

two elegant pavilions,

one on each side, having at each

extremity a portico

thirty-three meters sixty-six

centimeters in length...

Mouhot was a very keen observer.

He was a collector of information.

He had this natural history

background to describe things

in a very careful way.

So when he found the monuments

at Angkor,

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