means of communication between house and house; urchins paddle themselves about astride of rotting logs. The chaloupe brings up alongside a raft moored at the extreme edge of this floating village, and takes in cargo. The ubiquitous Chinese seem to be the principal inhabitants, but one wonders how it comes to pass that the driving-power of

even Oriental perversity should have sufficed to induce people to establish a settlement in so unpromising a place.

When the floods subside, Kompong Chnang settles down ingloriously into the the mud. Every junk careens, or is propped up somehow, every raft cants to one side, its floats sinking solidly into the ooze, every boat is stranded. Eventually the mud cakes and hardens and will bear a man's weight with ease, but before this happens there is a season during which Kompong Chnang stands a sort of siege, invested by armies of slime, and suffering the dire assaults of fever. It is spoken of in Indo-China as "the Venice of Kambodia," title which suggests the grandiose delusions of a victim of general paralysis.

Shortly after leaving Kompong Chnang, the entrance to the great lake of Ton-lé Sap is reached. This immense sheet of inland water, which measures in places some sixty miles across, covers a huge area, and is fed by innumerable little rivers. At times it is lashed by the wind into quite a formidable sea, and the bad sailor, who has left the ocean two hundred miles behind him,

may find here a renewal of all his agonies. It has no abrupt ending, for it melts into the flat surrounding country quite imperceptibly through wide areas of what are locally termed submerged "forest." The big villages of Pur-sat, Siam Reap, and Battambang each stand some miles inland, and are reached by sampans which scrape their way up the shallow rivers upon which they stand.

We came to a halt off the mouth of the Pur-sat river during the night, and reached the mouth of the Siam Reap just before the dawn. daylight came grudgingly, and showed through its wan light

The

rickety wooden structure perched on immensely high piles, and canted crazily to the left. For the rest, on the western side there was nothing to be seen but the wide, still waters of the lake spreading away to the horizon, and on the left the line of mean scrub standing up to its waist in water. Big roofed sampans were awaiting us, and those who were bound for Angkor seized each upon one of these and began the ferocious battle which is the accompaniment of every action on board one of these chaloupes.

The Commissaire, of course, was asleep. The crew are there to work the ship, not to help passengers. The people of the sampan-two men and a boy

had muscles like worsted yarn. Even the lightest weights broke through their hold. The ship, you are informed, will leave at six o'clock whether you have got off or no. You

must load your sampan yourself, and if you are wise you set to work like a navvy. Healthy exercise is good for the body, especially in the early morning, but this particular form of exercise upsets your preconceived notions of the eternal fitness of things if you have lived long east of Suez. To force the meanest white man to hump his own kit and load his own boat while scores of natives watch his labours has a flavour, to our thinking, of methods of barbarism. So, seemingly, thought two Malays who were among the deck-passengers, for they helped me like

men.

Their muscles were not made of pack-thread, and moreover they spoke their own language. Most of the Malays in Kambodia speak an antique tongue called Cham,-the ancient language of the now defunct kingdom of Champa.

Everything was got in-board at last, and the loaded sampan waddled off shorewards. Seated upon one of my boxes with a man and a boy in front of me, each working a single oar, gondola fashion, while a third, at the stern behind the roofed space, steered in a similar way, I looked out at the submerged "forest" of which I had heard so much. It consisted of low, coarse scrub bushes, green atop, dead where the flood had smothered them in mud, and standing in shallow water. It was not forest at all,-it was not in the least impressive. It was only dirty and mean and amphibian. A mile or two of this brought us to the mouth of a little river, its low banks covered by a growth of sparse

bushes, and up this we crept, sticking fast every hundred yards or so. With much shouting the two paper-backed men and the small boy got over the side and shoved feebly. It took my boat four mortal hours to reach the mud-bank upon which five bullock-carts awaited me.

With much effort and outcry my gear was loaded into these incredibly small carts, each drawn by a pair of fat little humped bulls, and I set off across the mud flat in the direction of Siam Reap.

This place, which with the Province that surrounds it and that of Battambang have recently been ceded to the French by Siam in exchange for Chantabun, consists of a long straggling village, built in palm- and fruit-groves upon each bank of the little river that bears its name. It is the precise counterpart of any big Malay village that you may like to name on the east coast of the Peninsula, and like all such places it has a charm that is indefinable. The houses are built upon piles, and nestle cosily under their canopies of frond and leafy bough. Before each of them is to be found the antediluvian rice pestle and mortar, worked with a footlever, which is an indispensable part of the household machinery of every Malay family. The golden thatch is "zebra'd," as the French say, by the sunlight struggling through the clustering greenstuff overhead; the little river runs, shallow but silent, between the compounds which stand on either bank; big sam

pans are moored at the landingstages; dug-outs pass up and down constantly; figures gay or quaint-figures of women with short, erect hair, and dressed, save for a coloured scarf, precisely as are the men, in white blouse and sompot, figures of old hags, incredibly bald and bent, figures of men, of boys, and of little, naked children, soft and round like tiny yellow puff-balls - pass hither and thither in the dust of the un-made bullock-track, or squat in dark doorways. Only here and there a pagoda or a dagoba arises to show that, all outward seeming notwithstanding, the place is not Malay and Muhammadan, but Kambodian and Buddhist.

The track winds on and on, keeping close all the while to the river's right bank, through some three miles of such village as this; past the huts on their piles with the tiny palmleaf household shrines, like makeshift Punch and Judy shows, at their gates; past the lines of fences; past the occa

sional water wheels, turning slowly to send a little trickle flowing down bamboo-pipes to some specially favoured house; past some scattered Chinese shops; past the old Siamese fort, now Siamese no longer; past the big enclosure of a pagoda across the stream, where yellow bonzes are sweeping beneath the sacred botrees, and so out once more into a region of sparse secondary growth from amid which a few big trees spring skyward. Then the bullock-carts turn sharply inland, and after crossing a tract of scrub and damar-trees, the latter with big charred cavities at their bases where the natives have melted out the resin, suddenly the dome over the western gate of Angkor Wat-a dome like a gigantic fir-cone fashioned of grey stone-comes into view. The end of the pilgrimage has been reached at last. That which lies at the end of the long journey is payment overfull for all the toil of travel.

The string of bullock-carts skirts the margin of a big artificial moat, turns to the right along a high embankment of earth which cuts this moat in two, and heads straight for the western gate of the great temple. Immediately in front of you is the gate itself, surmounted by a huge carved cone of sandstone; to the right and the left the massive walls, windows, and roofs of the

cloisters spread away and are half hidden in greenery. The colour is grey, but the roofs of the cloisters are covered with a growth of lichen which is brown or purple or black as the sunlight strikes it, and the central tower is streaked and daubed with similar patches of sombre hue. To the very gate of the temple the carts approach, then turn to the left, between moat and and cloister,

skirt the latter till the end is reached, and make their way into the sacred enclosure by one of the level entrances which in olden days were used for the passage of the eleplants. A great stone causeway, ten feet high and forty feet in width, rises on the right. It connects the western gate with the great temple of Angkor Wat itself; but here the iconoclast has been busy, for the stone parapet on either side has been laid low, and only an occasional sevenheaded serpent writhes erect into the air, or one or two heraldic lions, in grotesque postures, survive their fellows.

The carts follow a track parallel to the causeway, pass to the rear of a little templeone of two which flank the causeway at the centre of its length, and bring up eventually at a thing which is locally called a sala, but which in other lands would be described as a tumble-down hut. This at the time of my visit was the only accommodation for visitors which had so far been provided by what my French friends in Indo-China lovingly name "cette brute d'Administration." Recently a good hotel has been established by the Kambodian Government, and the journey rendered far more easy and comfortable.

Now, from the point of view of the individual, it is axiomatic that one must live, somehow, even if those responsible for Angkor cannot be brought to recognise the necessity; wherefore it follows that the time and attention of the visitor to these ruins is in the

first instance so completely occupied with gross material matters that he has none to expend upon the object of his pilgrimage. The front door of the sala is connected by a plank to the causeway itself; from the back-door a crazy ladder leads into a quagmire. The quagmire is artificial, not natural. It is formed by waste water, slops, and refuse from the sala. In the centre of this quagmire the bullockcarts come to a halt.

As for the sala, it is the story of the chaloupe over again. A portion of the barnlike space is partitioned off in such a fashion as to form four rooms: the visitors number about a dozen. The first arrivals occupy the four cubicles, the overflow camps as best it may in the centre of the sala, in which, also, all have to eat and carry on the ordinary business of existence. Of sanitary arrangements there are none, but a tub of sorts may be obtained, after due competition, at a a neighbouring well. I slept the first night in the sala, among the cookingpots and the baggage and the overflow visitors; but on the following day, by the kindness of M. Commaille, the Conservateur of the Ruins, I was accommodated in one of the little temples half way down the long causeway. The building, fashioned of massive blocks of stone fitted each to each with a marvellous accuracy of adjustment, was some twenty feet high. The great walls, delicately carved, rose all round me, meeting overhead in a sharp angle. In four places

big windows pierced their thickness, and north, south, east, and west there were portals half blocked by huge, fallen stones. The floor was paved, but was inches deep in dust. The gloom of the place and the enormous thickness of the walls afforded a grateful coolness.

Architecturally two things were specially noticeable. The roofs, which formed an acute angle, were not true arches, for the formula of the keystone was a secret which the Brahmans, in spite of all their wonderful skill as builders, never appear to have discovered. Secondly, the angles of the corners of the walls were fortified by great "beams" of stone, utterly useless in a masonry building such as this, and indeed by their weight imposing an extra and wholly unnecessary strain, but clearly a survival from times when these architects wrought, not in stone, but in wood. These stone "cross-beams" supply a curious instance of how habit can survive the need which formed it.

The manner in which the Brahman architects surmounted the difficulty of the arch requires a word of explanation. Beginning at the point in two parallel walls where they should be made to converge, they placed each stone successively upon its fellow in such a manner that a portion overlapped upon the inner side, but was kept firmly in place by the counteracting weight of the rest. This process was repeated again and again until the converging projections of

stone came into actual contact. At this stage the arching part of the building must have resembled a couple of staircases meeting at the top in a block of

stone common to both. Next, the steps and angles of these stairways, both within and without the building, were laboriously cut away, till a flush surface had been secured, and a very fair substitute for an arch had been contrived. On the exterior side, the cutting away was done with great care, and only the peculiar pitch of the roof shows that no true arch has been built; but within less delicacy was used, for, as a few fragmentary remains at Angkor Wat show us even to this day, a roof of wood, carved as curiously as the stone itself, formed the ceilings of the cloisters and corridors.

I held myself to be fortunate in that I had escaped from a house of modern to a temple of ancient Kambodian construction, and I maintained this opinion stoutly for some days. Then it began to rain -not the languid, half-hearted downpour which in England is supposed to let fall cats and dogs, but the steady, relentless, determined deluge of the Tropics, the only really persistent and energetic thing which is natural to these hot climates. The whole of the surrounding country seemed to drain into my temple. Unsuspected crannies in ancient Khmer walls spouted discoloured rain-water; shower-baths launched themselves from the roofs; fountains bubbled up from the floors through the