|
Most of the temples in Takéo Province can be reached handily from Phnom Penh.
The walk to the summit proved the accuracy of this pessimism. It’s little wonder no one comes here. Surrounded by cliffs and ruined walls, Phnom Bayong is reached by a near-vertical staircase and is infested with murmuring bats. The boy told me that the mountain was sacred and that Buddhist nuns were looking after the ruins. They browsed the jungle surrounding it in search of ingredients used in traditional folk medicines. If I wanted, they would paint spells on my body to protect me from illness. It would be one dollar more. I readily agreed to this and paid up, but instead of visiting the spell-writing nuns, for some reason we ended up trudging down to another little temple nearby, from where the great delta waters could also be seen, a pale-brown brightness reaching to a somberly green horizon.
Like Phnom Bayong, it was enigmatic, fragmented in some way, and on the point of disappearing into forest. The Hindu images had long ago been removed. My dollar-sucking guide explained that there were four other temples on the sacred mountain and that there was a Buddhist hermit whom I could meet. The hermit would also paint spells on my body, and they would be even more powerful than the spells painted by the nuns. It would be one dollar more. What about the nuns? I asked. The nuns had run away, he said. They were afraid of foreigners. “Can’t we pay them to come back?”
“Pay? They nuns. Come to hermit.”
I paid up again, but as with the nuns the Buddhist hermit could not be found, and we ended up wandering all over the mountain as the afternoon waned. No one ever painted any spells on my body, but the boy did tell me the most famous legend of Phnom Bayong, which goes something like this:
Once upon a time a king called Preah Bat Bayong Kaur lived on this mountain with his wife, Neang Sak Kra’op (meaning roughly “the lady with perfumed hair”). The nefarious King of Siam—the Thais are always the bad guys in Khmer stories—heard of her beauty and sailed to the mountain in a ship. He threw a party for the queen, and while the Khmer guests were distracted, he made off with her and never returned. Years later, her son, Dey Khley, went in search of her and happened to come across her without knowing who she was. He fell in love with his mother and married her. But when they returned to Bayong, the king recognized his former wife and sentenced his son to build twelve huge ponds. The prince, said the king, could be reincarnated only when the twelve ponds ran dry. But even today they are full of water, and so the luckless son is still waiting in the afterlife for a drought. Thus are punished even the unwitting perpetrators of royal incest.
The Cambodian countryside is filled with such myths, which are like the rumors that come out of a past that recent history has all but obliterated. This is a land of submerged memories—a secretive and wary land which is mindful that bad things can always happen again. On the way back to Phnom Penh the next day, I stopped at the magnificent Angkorian-era temple of Phnom Chisor, built in the eleventh century by King Suryavarman I of Angkor. It’s the closest and most forbidding large-scale temple complex to Phnom Penh, apart from the lovely ruins of Ta Prohm on the Tonlé Bati lake. There is a kind of imperial swagger to it, a sense of overarching power. Both Ta Prohm and Phnom Chisor are more spectacular than the older Takéo temples—especially Chisor, with its superb terraces and richly carved reliefs. But now Chisor seemed to me less poignant than mysterious Phnom Da or Phnom Bayong.
Two other temples are connected to Chisor by a monumental staircase that winds its way down the side of the mountain, and the whole complex possesses a coherent splendor that Bayong cannot match. Yet Chisor feels more like what one experiences on a larger scale at Angkor. Coming down the enormous staircase, I enjoyed watching the boys playing soccer in a field of motionless cows that seemed not to notice the football flying between their legs. I was glad there weren’t five thousand tour guides ready to explain what this meant.
I TOOK MY CAR back to Route 2 and on the way stumbled upon two neglected brick towers that stood at the edge of a modern shrine. They are the remains of a place called Prasat Neang Khmau, or “Black Lady” in Khmer, a tenth-century temple whose name perhaps alludes to Kali, the dark destructive goddess. I knew that from here had come two enigmatic statues that are now also in the National Museum in Phnom Penh. Like the sculptures of Phnom Da, they have fascinated me for years, and when I returned to Phnom Penh I went in to look at them. One is an equine avatar of Vishnu known as Vajimukha, a male body with a horse’s head, and the other is a female divinity of some kind dressed in a fluted robe that is tied above a lustrous, smooth navel. Her head is missing, and her surface is now a dark-jade color.
They stand in the same room as the great pieces from Phnom Da, and although they are from a later century, they have the same archaic otherness about them. They are more beautiful, more human somehow than the masterpieces of Angkor that occupy the foreground of our perceptions of Cambodia. And like the place from which they were torn long ago by French experts, they are something of a quiet secret—a civilization within a civilization, waiting to be rediscovered when Cambodia can finally afford the splendid luxury of memory.
|