Page:History of Indian and Eastern Architecture Vol 2.djvu/478

 402 FURTHER INDIA. BOOK VIII. surrounded by a double wall, with moat between. The western .portion of the enclosure was probably occupied by the King and his family, and with the exception of the pyramidal temple of Phimanakas, a few towers and many stone banks, no archi- tectural remains have been found. In front of the palace enclosure was a great terrace over 800 ft. long by 45 ft. wide, and 15 ft. high, the walls of which were sculptured with elephants ; no traces of walls of any description have been found in front of this terrace, suggesting that it formed an open space where reviews took place before the King and his courtiers on the terrace. At the north end of this square is a cruciform structure about 30 ft. wide and 60 ft. long, richly decorated, with six bands of sculptured figures, and it was on the top of this that the French explorers found the supposed statue of the leprous king to whom the monument was ascribed. The walls of the cities were also of very great extent, and of dimensions commensurate with their importance. They seem generally to have been constructed of a coarse ferruginous stone in large blocks, and only the gates and ornamental parts were of the fine-grained sandstone of which the temples and palaces are built. Wonderful as these temples and palaces are, the circumstance that, perhaps, after all gives the highest idea of the civilisation of these ancient Cambodians is the perfec- tion of their roads and bridges. One great trunk road seems to have stretched for 300 miles across the country from Korat, in a south-easterly direction, to the Me-kong river. It was a raised causeway, paved throughout like a Roman road, and every stream that it crossed was spanned by a bridge, many of which remain perfect to the present day. Dr. Bastian describes two of these : one, 400 ft. in length, and 50 ft. in breadth, richly ornamented by balustrades and cornices, and representations of snakes and the Snake king. 1 The extraordinary thing is, that it is constructed without radiating arches, but like every structure in the place, by a system of bracketing or horizontal arches, and without cement. Yet it has withstood, for five centuries at least, the violence of the tropical torrent which it spans. Even if no vestiges of these roads or bridges remained, the sculptures of Angkor Vat are sufficient to prove the state of perfection which the art of transport had reached in this community. In these there are numerous representations of chariots, all with wheels from 3 ft. or 5 ft. in height, and with sixteen spokes, which must be of metal, for no London coach- maker at the present day could frame anything so delicate Journal of the Royal Geographical Society,' vol. xxxv. p. 75.