Forlong - Rivers of Life

112
Rivers of Life, or Faiths of Man in all Lands.
all the ancient temples were for serpent worship. The temples stand in square courts,
capable of being flooded, and are crossed by light bridges of atone. Almost all can be
flooded, and many can only now be reached by wading; the architecture is of the
simplest description, generally very small, and somewhat like this. It seems as if the
early race had simply tried to build a plain
box or home for their symbolic god to live
in, secure from the enemies which his present
fleshy tenement exposed him to. He
was a real living god, and required to be left
very much to his own devices, and until
they got another symbol, architects musts
have been sorely puzzled by his aqueous, or
Fig. 37—SERPENT HOUSE OR TEMPLE.
rather sub- and super-terraqueous ways.
Under the head Boodhism, and the sup-
posed great serpent temple of Kambodia, I have stated that I believe its architecture
to be the offspring of a later faith, grafting itself on serpent-worshipping races, who,
I think, must have been the builders of the magnificent shrine which Fergusson, following
Dr. Bastian and Mr. Thomson, calls Nak-non-vat, a name which seems to denote
its serpent origin. 1 Look at the character of the ornamentations: We are told that
every angle of every roof is adorned with a grim seven-headed serpent having a magnificent
crest; every cornice, entablature; every balustrade and every ridge has continuous
rows of seven-headed snakes, yet there is no image in the sanctuary, no
worship on the walls, but every court contains a tank for water. Nevertheless,
seeing that no such shrine has, so far as I know, been erected in the East to this faith,
I must think that Boodhists planned and carried out all, save perhaps the serpent omaments
and tanks, which, when they were expelled in turn, the aborigines completed in
their own way; but we must all speak, like Fergusson, very diffidently regarding this
fine temple-palace. It was visited in 1860 by the French naturalist, M. Henrie
Monhot, and later by Mr J. Thomson, to whom we owe some splendid photos of it.
He took a month to travel from Bankok to the Kambodian frontier, and found what is
believed to be the ancient capital of Kambodia, enveloped in a dense forest. The site
is called Angkor, and is situated on the lake Touli or Tali—Indian for a lake, near its
head. “The principal ruins embrace a circle of fifty miles in diameter” around lake
Tali, and are mostly in Siam-Kambodia—not in that part which was made independent
under the French treaty with Siam of 1863: “Within this fifty-mile circle
there are larger walled cities, and temples more curious and extensive than those of
Central America.” Fergusson says, that nothing, since the Asyrian discoveries, has
been more startling in architecture, than these cities: So here we have a great capitalcity,
with palaces, temples, and cathedrals or basilicas devoted to our third faith.
There are writings on the ruins, in characters resembling Pali or Sanakrit, which
1 Sanskrit Nāga-nātha-Vaut = “Having a Serpent protector.”