Jake nodded.
“We got it, we’re not lingering.”
Sonisoy was scribbling something on a notebook page. He ripped it out and handed it over, explaining: “Barnier’s address and number, in Bangkok. He lives in Bangkok now. When you get there, you could look him up. He may know more than he told us. OK, we go left here.”
They all looked ahead. A glimmering sheet of water barred the end of the road, tinted gold by the morning sun. The great serene moat around Angkor Wat temple. Jake remembered that Angkor was built around and on top of and because of water: vast artificial lakes, beautiful and serene barays.
Some of them were eight kilometers long. And huge moats, too, reservoirs, aquifers, conduits: all quenching the thirst of the greatest city built before the age of industrialization. Perhaps the greatest city ever built. And now the barays were glittering gold and bloody yellow in the hot rising sun.
They turned left, puttering around the water barrier. The first tourist buses were already parked under the banyans by the Angkor Wat causeway. From a distance the hundreds of tourists slowly crossing the moat looked, to Jake, like the spirits of the newly dead silently and obediently proceeding unto oblivion, crossing the Styx.
“We’re going to the Bayon first.”
This temple, Jake knew, was beyond Angkor Wat. It was within the ancient city precincts proper: Angkor Thom.
Ahead of them a wide bridge crossed another moat; the balustrades consisted of two nagas, enormous long stone snakes snarling their fangs, forever devouring the warm tropical air, ridden by stone demons, also snarling. And the gate itself was a mouth, a huge yawning stone mouth topped with the serene smiling face of Jayavarman, the king-god.
As they trundled under the gate, driving right under the godhead, kids ran out to sell their trinkets and DVDs and bottles of water—Mister, mister, you buy, America good, England good, barang, you buy—while others scampered down from the crumbling great walls, grinning and jeering at Jake, making their eyes round by squashing their faces, laughing.
Children were everywhere, on the balustrades, hanging from trees, running in the road, scampering, laughing — children running and smiling in the street, like his sister. The sadness and grief stabbed at Jake, maliciously; he took out his cheap little camera and grabbed a few shots. He needed to mediate the sadness.
Snap.
The tuk-tuk accelerated under and beyond the gate. For a few minutes they drove in anxious silence, the sunshine flickering in the laurels and bamboo and gigantic kapok trees, as dark, somber birds flapped away. Ahead of them was a palace of enormous stone heads.
The Bayon.
“We get off here first.” Sonisoy gestured at the tuk-tuk driver. “He will wait.”
The temple of the Bayon was just as Jake recalled it from his cursory touristic visit two years back. A series of large, square, ascending sandstone terraces, delicately inscribed with bas-reliefs of apsaras and garudas, and serene female deities, devatas and dvarapalas, and scenes of Khmer life from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries: princesses on palanquins, cockfights and boar fights, scrolling stone tapestries of Hindu myths, the ark of the sacred fire, the churning of the ocean of milk, the god of love murdered by Shiva.
Jake took more photos.
What marked the Bayon was the heads: every significant point in the temple terminated in a pinnacle beautifully carved with megalithic human heads, serene and huge and enigmatic visages of the god-king. Smiling.
They climbed the very narrow stone steps to the innermost enclosure of the temple, the prasat. It was hot now. Jake was panting in the impervious sun. It was like they were too close to the sun.
“Jayavarman,” said Sonisoy. “The heads of Jayavarman, here in the Bayon, represent the apogee of Angkorian culture, the apotheosis, when the king becomes a living god and society is perfected. Many people find these heads disturbing. I think it is the smiles. The size of the heads, and the eternal smiles.”
Jake agreed. He found them awesome but they unsettled him. Maybe it was the vast serene smile, slightly different in every sculpted face. He remembered a face, smiling sadly in the dark, a large face, enormous, smiling. Disembodied.
“Now, this is crucial. Look,” said Sonisoy. He pointed at the nearest enormous head.
Chemda said, “What?”
“There.”
“But I can’t see!”
Chemda kicked off her flip-flops and climbed a balustrade to get a better look. Jake gazed at her ankles. She had a delicate tattoo of a scorpion on her slender left ankle. Sonisoy pointed again.
“There. You see the forehead of the god-king. There is a diamond there, a rhombus. No? Carved distinctly in the forehead — like a hole in the head. It represents, of course, the third eye of Hindu mythology: the location of the soul, the place in the mind where God resides. Consider the bindi of an Indian woman, the mark between and above her eyes — the same thing. So. Remember this — it’s important — because the rest of the story is in Preah Kahn. We must be quick.”
Hastily, almost slipping, they made it down the treacherous and mossy steps to ground level. Sonisoy led the way out, past the Terrace of the Elephants, past the Terrace of the Leper King, with its dancing demons and manic garudas, skinned Wagnerian sopranos singing mutely through their sandstone beaks at the uncaring forest.
The lane to the west gate of Angkor Thom was unpaved, virtually jungled over. Monkeys swung away as they approached, disappearing into the lianas and the cotton trees. The noise of insects was close to deafening. Jake had heard cicadas rasping before, but this was like a mass screaming, like the whole forest was shrieking in anger, or torment.
Sonisoy led them through another snarling huge gate, topped with another huge head of another god-king, and then they were in even thicker jungle. Cobwebs laced the pathway, invisible but very tangible. Jake spat them from his mouth with disgust. Translucent lynx spiders fled up his arm, until he flicked them off. Chemda fought the red ants that dropped into her hair. Lianas, sticky with some gross exudation, snagged at their arms and legs.
Sonisoy turned, a faint smile of pity on his face.
“Few people make it this far into the jungle — to Preah Kahn, one of the oldest temples of Angkor. Originally a university. Here.”
The temple loomed, old and vast and very ruined. More giant garudas guarded the walls at every corner. Nagas lay waiting on either side of the entrance; headless statues of gods stood as sentinels at the porch.
“Through here, and here… left here, just down this way….”
It was a labyrinth of dozing sunlight, ancient darkness, fallen stone pillars, and mutilated stone buddhas. Enclosures, gopuras, doorways, columned doorways, and then long, broken corridors where bats nested in the upper corners.
“It’s vast,” Chemda said.
“Twenty thousand people lived in Preah Kahn at its height,” said Sonisoy. “And we don’t know what they studied.”
He had finally brought them to a kind of open cloister. The far wall backed onto the jungle.
“That place there,” said Sonisoy, gesturing, “is unique in Angkor. The only building with round columns. Probably some kind of sacred library. As for what it contained…”
It was a roofless pavilion, elegant, empty, desolate. Massive spiderwebs hung like constellations from the empty sandstone windows.