Evening Republican, Volume 23, Number 127, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 26 May 1920 — BURIED IN JUNGLE [ARTICLE]

BURIED IN JUNGLE

Tropic Growth Overwhelmed City of Angker Thom. i Devastation Wrought, Especially by the Deadly Fig Tree, Is So Complete as to Be Almost Unbelievable. In the heart of Cambodia, one of the five provinces of French Indo-Chlna, Ue the ruins of the royal city of Angkor Thom, built somewhere between the fifth and seventh centuries, and of the marvelous temple, Angkor Wat. The architecture, which Is Hindu, Is being disentangled from jungle growths by French archeologists. The city and temple are thought to have been built by the Khmers, a long-vanished race which certainly has no connection with the Cambodians of the present day. Writing In Harper’s, Ellen N. La Motte describes a trip through the jungle on an elephant in order to visit one of the more remote ruins. “In about ten minutes,” she writes, “we found ourselves climbing over the fallen stones of an immense temple that lay completely buried and overgrown by the forest So thick was the foliage that only a dim twilight prevailed. The supreme loneliness of that buried temple, the utter isolation and silence that enveloped It, were appalUng, and our scrambling feet and hushed voices only intensified the awful stillness—the silence of centuries. "The horror and vindictiveness of the jungle! Every where giant stones were overthrown, pushed out of place ■ and toppled over In heaps through the | sinister vitality of that deadly tree, the j fig tree of the ruins. The roots of I this tree begin as innocent, hairlike filaments which insinuate themselves through the crevices of the great stones and slip through tiny openings and cracks, then grow and develop with an evil vigor that nothing can withstand. They never die, never ard starved out, these fine, hairlike roots. The big stones never crush or kill them. Year by year, century, their fierce strong life is fostered by the fierce heat and fierce Yalns of. the tropics until they overthrow and destroy everything in tneir pathway. One fearful root that wandered In Its course through a whole corridor of mighty carvings was 90 meters In length, with the circumference of an elephant And the tree Is useless, too —just spongy, porous wood, unfit for anything. “For an hour we wandered through dim, ruined chambers, scrambled and climbed over fallen pillars and carvings of great beauty and delicate, intricate design—all In utter ruin and the fig tree of destruction In supreme control. It was good to reach our elephanta again and to leave behind that overwhelmed and evil spot. • ♦ ♦ “Only the most Important and beautiful ruins are being reclaimed from the forest, those In Angkor Thom, as well as the Angkor Wat. These out; lying ones are still left as originally discovered, buried and smothered by the everlasting forest. To me they are far more Interesting In this sinister setting, choked and swamped by the mighty growth of the tropical jungle. They afford more thrills to me who am not an archeologist than the picked up, restored and cleared ruins that the government is reclaiming. “Of course, one cannot see them very well, these buried temples, swamped In undergrowth, enveloped by a twilight gloom. And as I scramble over fallen images, over barbaric sculptures, my mind is largely set on serpents. And when we reach a fairly open space it turns to monkeys—the agile black gibbons that hoot and leap overhead at our coming, furious at the intrusion upon tbelr solitude. Between snakes and monkeys there are times when I forget to admire these old temples, supposed to be among the most marvelous In the world.”