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 which went to deck the temple of Jehovah in Jerusalem. The discovery of vast mines in southern Africa, which are believed to date from an immense antiquity, has led of late years to the conclusion that this was the region whence Solomon in his glory drew his stores of gold.

M. Auguste Pavie in the second volume of his monumental work on Indo-China contends that ancient Kambodia is the original Ophir, and that to the whole of the vast peninsula, rather than to its southern portion of Malaya, was applied in ancient days the name of the Chersonesus Aurea. The wonderful civilisation of the Khmers which brought into being the splendid buildings of Angkor, of which more will be said in a later chapter, testifies to the existence of a mighty empire in Indo-China which must once have been a centre of wealth and commerce. The vast siltage, borne down from the remote interior by the floods of the Mekong, has changed the face of the country within historical times, and Angkor Thom itself, now distant nearly two hundred miles from the coast, was once a seaport. That the Khmer Empire must in its day have played an important part in the history of eastern Asia cannot be doubted, but M. Pavie's arguments, plausible though they often are, fail to carry conviction when he seeks to prove the identity of Kambodia with Ophir. Also, as regards his contention that the whole of Indo-China was included in the term the Golden Chersonese, it is difficult to believe that what is in fact an immense peninsula was ever recognised as such by the early mariners and geographers. Its bulk is too