|
The Mekong is a river I have always feared a little—it is sea-like, sinister, inscrutable. It breeds some of the world's largest freshwater beasts: Irrawaddy dolphins, giant catfish, and stingrays. It begins in Tibet and is the earth's most productive freshwater fishery. In November, it turns into a floodplain, and as I crossed it then its waves were thick with rotting flowers and roots and knotted floating grass. Birds swooped around the boat, following it, and their nests could be seen in the tops of drowned trees. After forty minutes, a silhouette came into view as if rising out of this temporary and demented unnatural sea: the forbidding "sacred mountain" of Phnom Da, its tower black against the storm and stark in its enforced solitude.
Steps rose up steeply through still-wet jungle. At the top, the Mekong waters appeared on all sides and an imposing brick-and-stone prasat (the Khmer word for a tower or pagoda) stood alone in a froth of wildflowers, its walls dark rust-red and black. Beautiful carvings soared above the doorways, and the chiseled plinths were still firm and elegant. But the prasat itself was clearly empty: looted, or gutted by archaeologists—one never knows in Cambodia.
A cowherd stood with his cattle before the main doorway. As I appeared, he simply held out a casual hand and said, “One dollar”—that Khmer refrain which every traveler guiltily repels. With him was a man suffering from some kind of illness, his hands twisted and his eyes lopsided. He seemed to be in informal charge of the shrine within. They watched me silently. Inside, there was a lingam stand (an emblem of the god Shiva) with two bowls of incense sticks, now exposed to the sky: Concentric brick rectangles rose vertiginously upward to an opening through which the rain fell. The tower was engulfed in forest, intimate amid its surroundings, and inaccessible to historical knowledge. The guardian came rolling toward me on his misaligned hips, his hand outstretched.
He croaked out a greeting, which sounded like, “B’muray.”
“B’muray,” I said.
“No,” he repeated. “You Bill Murray. You give me five dollar.”
(It is true that there is a resemblance.)
For years, and especially when I lived in Phnom Penh, I had been coming to the National Museum and admiring a strange group of statues. They are kept in a gallery to one side, a little ignored, and are unlike any other in Cambodia. Dark green in color, far older than the masterpieces from Angkor Wat which otherwise crowd the museum, these huge pieces possess a style and sexual grace that seem to come from an entirely different civilization. They were discovered in the ruins of Phnom Da in 1935, by Henri Mauger, and were dated to about the sixth century A.D. In the middle was a gigantic figure of Vishnu with eight arms, his hands clutching a flame, an antelope skin, and a flask, and on either side of him two smaller figures of Rama and Balarama. To me, they were the most beautiful and imposing things in the museum, and the most emotionally appealing. And so I had always wanted to get to know the place where they had come from—the remote southern Cambodian province of Takéo. How could a site so unknown have produced art so great?
Prasat Neang Khmau, built in the early tenth century, is also known as the Temple of the Black Lady—its name perhaps alludes to Kali, the dark goddess of destruction.
The “Phnom Da style” is the most ancient sculptural genre in what is now Cambodia. The ten-foot figure of Vishnu is carved from a single block of sandstone, and only five of his eight hands are still attached to surviving arms. But all of them are carved with finesse, the individual nails carefully delineated. Like a young pharaoh, the god wears a tall cylindrical hat and a folded loincloth. His physique, too—slender and lifelike, with wide shoulders and a little bulging belly fat below the navel—reminds one of Egyptian figures. This is the oldest known Cambodian sculpture. Even the dark-green polished, shiny surface of Vishnu seems different from the texture of later styles.
Where do these oval faces, aquiline noses, and almond-shaped eyes come from? Even the tear ducts, the pupils, and canthi of the eyes are perfectly carved. The figure of Balarama, the elder brother of Krishna, whcih stands to the right of Vishnu, is particularly moving. His left eye has been obliterated, but his gentle smile is still intact, as is the symbolic plow he carries. His figure is boyish, tilted at the hips. Rama, meanwhile, holds a tall bow and gazes down at us with a haughty gentility. As an avatar of Vishnu, he is associated with chivalry and virtue.
I knew where Phnom Da was on the map—it lies a few miles from the Vietnam border, in the Mekong floodplain. This means that in winter it turns into an island and one has to get there by boat. This was forbiddingly appealing. Since none of the Khmer temples outside the tourist circuit of Angkor Wat are well known, I was well aware that it would be more arduous than simply taking a plane to Siem Reap and staying in yet another Royal Angkor Village boutique lodge with an Anantara spa. But there are only so many times you can walk around Angkor Wat at dawn with fifty thousand Korean tourists, searching for mystical solitude. People said that the temples of Takéo were like Angkor fifty years ago, even if they were nowhere near as grand. It was, I thought, unlikely to be true, but it would be enough for me if they were merely different.
When I arrived in the port town of Takéo, the waters were so high that the longtails for hire at the jetties were almost level with the street behind them. Takéo is always a lethargic proposition: a market caked with fruit skins, a few lok-lak restaurants with nightly song and dance, a handful of wretched guesthouses with those balconies of oddly plasticated columns that Cambodians love. They were now milky-brown under storm clouds. The tops of submerged mango trees swarmed with swallows, grasses floating between them. It’s about a fifty-dollar longtail ride to cross this strange landscape that does not promise hospitality. On the far side of it can be found both Phnom Da and a very different place called Angkor Borei, a village in a lagoon with some unusual remains. They lie within an area known as "the cradle of Khmer civilization."
Sixteen hundred years ago, Angkor Borei was a huge city named Vyadhapurya, the capital of a state that Chinese chroniclers of the third century A.D. called Funan. In A.D. 240, two Chinese ambassadors named Kang Tai and Zhu Ying visited the kingdom and provided a few fragmented descriptions of it. The Chinese gave the title "Fan" to the Funan kings, so their names have come down to us in Chinese forms—the founder king was known as Fan Shi Man. Funan was the first great state of Southeast Asia—and is also the least known, with much of its architecture having all but disappeared.
|