With every step my boots sank to the ankle and sometimes halfway to the knee in the slimy mulch of decaying leaves and reeking mud. I wormed through thick groves of bamboo and crept through gigantic rhododendron bushes. Their rubbery leaves swished against my face and slapped my shoulders. I hoped I would not disturb a sleeping boar. Or, for that matter, one of the slithering reptiles that infested this rotting hellhole.
Soon the light became dimly visible through the densely packed trees. It waxed and waned like a living thing of light. I paused from time to time to listen. No sound of diesel engines, no guttural Viet Cong voices, no chatter of radio static. Just the slap and wash of the river against the reedy shore, the rustle of small things sliding through the leaves, the thousand little ordinary sounds of the jungle.
I pushed forward, and came to the edge of a clearing. And stopped dead in my tracks, staring.
Before me, rising tier on tier out of the swampy bush, were the crumbling ramparts of an old stone city. Conical towers, covered with carved faces and wreathed with jungle vines, loomed up into the darkness.
I had stumbled upon a lost city, buried for ages in the jungles of Cambodia.
2. THE GATE BETWEEN THE WORLDS
To this very hour I can remember the thrill of shock that went through me as I first gazed upon the gates of the dead city. I can remember catching my breath with amazement, and the prickle of awe that roughened my skin and tingled at my nape as I stared at the uncanny spectacle that lay before me, drenched in the silver glamor of a brilliant moon.
The very unexpectedness of the discovery added to the air of the supernatural that hung about that timeless moment. One moment ago I had been worming my way though the dense black jungle, and in the next I stood before the frowning gates of a fantastic stone city left over from another age!
The transition was so miraculous, so swift, so unexpected, that it was as if some unseen magician had conjured the city into being before my eyes. Still, frozen, timeless, bathed in the mystery of moonlight, the city seemed an apparition. I thought of the glimmering mirages of the desert, and of that persistent image of an unknown city the Italian mariners have seen for centuries, hovering above the waters of the Straits of Messina―Fata Morgana, the superstitious fisherfolk call the floating mirage, and to this day the scientists have yet to solve the baffling mystery of the illusion that has haunted those Straits from the age of the Crusaders to this day.
Strange and very beautiful was this unknown and ruined metropolis of the Cambodian jungles that lay before me. I stood, frozen with awe, my nerves prickling with the cold premonition of the supernatural, almost as if in another breath I expected the moonlit ruins to evaporate into darkness―to vanish as swiftly and as mysteriously as they had flickered into being.
There were conical and many-sided stone towers that loomed up into the star-gemmed sky, their sides heavy with sculpted faces that glared down at me with blind eyes. Walls were thickly graven with weird hieroglyphic symbols in a tongue unknown to me, perhaps unknown and unreadable by any living man. What lost wisdom, what forgotten science, what mysterious lore, lay hidden in those huge and cryptic symbols?
Well did I know that the trackless jungles of old Cambodia were whispered as the haunt of legend and marvel and mystery. I had heard of the baffling stone ruins which lay far to the north―the jungle-grown cities and temples known as Angkor Vat and Angkor Thom. For untold centuries the jungle had concealed those colossal ruins, those vinegrown temples left over from the mysterious reign of the little-known Khmer race who had so curiously vanished from the face of the earth ages before. Was this mystery metropolis yet another monument abandoned in unknown antiquity by the strange and forgotten people we knew only as the Khmer? Lost in the unexplored jungles, had I stumbled across the threshold of an age-old secret city left behind in time's remotest dawn?
The stone gates towered before me, covered with weird glyphs. From the lintel above the arch, a heavy face of cold sandstone stared down at me with an enigmatic expression. Controlling a little shiver of uncanny awe, I stared back at that stone mask. Broad cheeks, flat nose, thick lips, wide glaring eyes―it was not a face of smiling welcome, that much was certain.
Was it a trick of moonlight and shadow, or did the faint trace of a mocking smile lurk in the dim, shadowed corners of those stone lips? Was it an illusion of my overstrained imagination, or did I glimpse the flicker of an impersonal, aloof intelligence in those wide and staring eyes, and―a chill, remote amusement?
What secret lore of unknown antiquity lay hidden behind the frozen smile of that guardian deity or demon whose face was set high above the gates of the lost city? In the cold glory of the moonlight, the stone metropolis was like a labyrinth, all black inky shadow and faint rose sandstone.
A rose-red city, half as old as time ....
Unbidden, my memory conjured up that famous line from the old poem. Dimly I recalled that John William Burgon, the author of that poem, had been writing about the stone city of Petra in the deserts of Arabia. No matter: the line fit here just as well.
Almost without volition, my feet had carried me through those frowning portals, beneath the enigma of that stone guardian with its mocking smile, and into the rubbish-choked courtyard that lay beyond.
All about me rose a forest of megalithic stone towers, built of colossal blocks hewn from solid sandstone the color of pale coral or of the faint skies of early dawn glimpsed over the gliding floods of the Orinoco. Whatever elder wisdom this vanished race had possessed, they certainly knew the secrets of stone construction. Blocks of stone weighing tons apiece were so closely fitted together to build these soaring walls and tapering spires that they needed no concrete to hold them firm. And measureless centuries of wind and rain had dislodged but few of the great building stones.
I remembered that when the French explorer and naturalist Mouhot, the first to stumble upon the vast ruins of Angkor to the north, had questioned the natives about the mystery cities, they told him they were the work of many-armed giants. It had been Pra-Eun, sorceror-king of the Dawn Age, who had commanded captive titans to raise the walls of the ancient city. Gazing now upon these mighty towers and megalithic bastions, I could well believe them to be the work of primal colossi enslaved by some mighty magician from an unknown age.
I could not resist the urge of my curiosity, and began to explore the ruined metropolis. I prowled through stone-paved streets, down long galleries where weird and monstrous caryatids bore up stone architraves carved with snarling devilmasks and beaked demons. Time hung heavy here; its invisible weight pressed on my soul. There was an almost palpable aura of an immense and unbelievable antiquity that hung about these moldering ruins from time's dawn. I felt the shudder of superstitious awe go through me. It was as if I walked through a shadowy necropolis where gods themselves lay buried; as if with every step I risked awakening mummified wizards or unseen guardians who had slumbered the ages away, and into whose time-haunted precincts mine was the first intruder's step.
Who were the mysterious Khmer kings who had built these sprawling metropoli of ancient stone? Where had they gone, leaving behind this wilderness of carved stone, the haunt of shadows and silence, a kingdom given over to the whispering dominion of the patient spider? And I thought of the lost and ocean-whelmed cities of elder Atlantis and prehistoric Mu . . . of the stone enigma of the Ponape ruins, which A. Merritt had described in the opening pages of his great romance, The Moon Pool.