Page:The Downfall of the Gods (1911).pdf/23

 above them seemed an emanation from the dust with which they were powdered. Even the brilliant green of the rice-fields failed to strike a note of gaiety amid the dull blues and blacks that enveloped and swamped it. Though Nature had worked unnumbered miracles, clothing the earth with vegetation and filling with teeming life the water and the land, she seemed, in some obscure fashion, to suffer here an eternal defeat. The featureless aspect of the plain and the monotony of sad colouring combined to belittle its immensity. They made of it a thing paltry and mean—a mere background fitted only to throw into added prominence the Titanic works of man.

Of these the most stupendous was the great Wat.

From the day, more than five hundred years earlier, when the Brahman conquerors had stayed at last their wandering feet, and here, in this wilderness of Kambodia, had elected to consolidate their empire, they had wrought strenuously for their own honour and aggrandisement, but more strenuously still for the glory and the propitiation of the gods of their worship.

Quitting the banks of the sacred Ganges in about the fifth century of our era, and striking out recklessly into the Unknown, they had driven irresistibly forward across the great peninsula of Further India, fiery and impetuous as some tremendous conflagration that licks