The art and architecture of India - Buddhist, Hindu, Jain (Art Ebook)

CAMBODIA: THE KHMERS
4OI
which this fabulous ruin makes on the visitor is
incomparable. This effect is only in part due to
the beauty of the architecture; to an even
greater degree it is caused by the immensity of
the scale and the complete isolation of this great
temple-mausoleum in the jungle stillness. Perhaps
it might be compared to the impression
that would be produced on a wanderer in
another millennium coming suddenly upon the
ruins of Manhattan rising silent and empty
above the Hudson.
The city of Angkor Wat was the creation of
Suryavarman II (11 12-52), at once a monument
to the Devaraja and the sepulchre of its
founder. The monument is
orientated towards
the west and laid out on a rectangular plan, surrounded
by a moat nearly two and a half miles
in circumference [331]. The main entrance is
over a causeway lined on either side by balustrades
in the shape of giant nagas that rear their
enormous hoods at the beginning of this avenue.
A monumental portal on a cruciform base forms
the frontispiece to the temple proper. The
foundations of the sanctuary are a vast stone
platform, over three thousand feet on a side.
After passing through the portico, the visitor
finds himself in a vast galjery, more than half a
mile in circumference, decorated for some two
thousand five hundred feet of its length with
reliefs from the legend of Vishnu and the Land
of Yama, the Lord of Death. This cloistered
arcade forms the outer perimeter of the entire
plan. A stairway rising from the main portico
leads to a square, crossed by galleries and containing
four small open courts. From this level
another staircase on the main axis brings us to
the second level of the temple in the form of a
great courtyard surrounded by colonnades and
with towers at the corners. From the centre of
this platform rises the mountainous turreted
pyramid, itself the size of many earlier Khmer
temples, that supports the innermost shrine of
the sanctuary [332]. The steep declivity of this
tremendous mound, with stairways on all four
332. Angkor Wat, central shrine
sides rising at precipitous angles, serves to
increase the illusion of height. At the very
summit looms the topmost spire, joined to the
galleries surrounding the uppermost level by
cruciform arcades. At the angles of this highest
storey lesser sikhara towers echo the shape of
the central spire, originally crowned by a golden
lotus which rose over two hundred feet above
the ground. Under this central tower which
contained the image of the Devaraja was discovered
a well, more than one hundred and
twenty feet deep, in which a deposit of gold
objects was found. It is likely that this shaft
symbolized the world pivot that was the pestle