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 CHAPTER VI

AN APPEAL TO THE GODS

the half-built southern portal of the outer cloister of Angkor Wat, a gang of perhaps five hundred men was toiling in the blazing heat of noon. The moving shadows which they cast were circular, squat patches of blackness, stain- ing the white dust; those thrown by the sheer walls of the cloisters were incredibly narrow, clean-cut and hard. The sparse cocoanut palms—their fronds lifting and stiffening in the heat—had little sun-striped circles drawn about their boles. For the rest, the rank growth of grass. and the blinding earth, where the passage of innumerable unshod feet had worn the vegetation to powder, lay exposed to the vertical sun rays, and the refraction from them struck upward with an intolerable intensity.

High noon poised above Angkor Wat—tropical noontide, fierce and pitiless; yet within the half-finished gateway, where old Slat was sitting, a dim dusk prevailed. Above him roughly-hewn stones, the successive strata inclining more and more to meet at last in the