As often as I sat in the porches of these temples, the chanted prayers of the worshippers boomed through the aisles and inspired me with feelings of the deepest devotion; and whenever I passed along the dim, silent corridors, and came unexpectedly in front of one of the great golden images with its folded arms and drooping eyelids, looking down upon me in monitory sadness, with the wisdom of ages stamped upon its brow, amid the gloom of a never-ending twilight, while the head and shoulders were illuminated by a halo of light from the unseen source above, the effect was strangely mystical, solemn, and profound.
The character of these buildings I do not exaggerate in calling them sublime; they prove unmistakably that the architect, whoever he was,
"Wrought in a sad sincerity;
Himself from God he could not free;
He builded better than he knew:
The conscious stone to beauty grew."
This impression was deepened every time I visited them, and, though I knew every inch of the temples and their surroundings, the meanings of some of the symbols remained mysterious and incomprehensible. If I succeeded in unravelling one portion, the remainder was lost in inextricable perplexity and doubt.
My pupils in that wonderful city numbered from twenty to twenty-five boys and girls, the loveliest and most remarkable of whom were the heir-apparent, the Prince Somdetch P'hra Paramendr Maha Chulalonkorn, his younger sister, the little fairy-like creature Fa Ying,[45] the Princesses Wanee, Ying-You Wahlacks, Somawati, the Prince Kreta-Bhinniharn, the only son of Hidden-Perfume, P'hra Ong Dwithwallabh, and Kabkranockratin, the sons of the child-wife; and in addition to these were several gentlewomen of the harem.
We always began school immediately after the Buddhists' morning service, which I was obliged to attend, so as to muster my pupils together in good order, and which was held precisely at nine o'clock in the temple of the Chom Manda Thai. The long inlaid and richly gilt table on which we pursued our studies day after day was the same on which had been laid every morning for hundreds of years offerings to the priests of Buddha, and whereon stood the bronze censers and the golden vases from which ascended clouds of fragrant incense amid the perfume of still more fragrant flowers, while the brilliant colors of the silks, satins, diamonds, and jewels that adorned the regal worshippers relieved the gloom.
The studies that took the most absolute possession of the fervid Eastern imaginations of my pupils were geography and astronomy. But each had his or her own idea about the form of the earth, and it needed no small amount of patient repetition to convince them that it was neither flat nor square, but round.
The only map—and a very ancient one it was—which they had ever seen was one drawn and painted about a century before, by a Siamese who was thought to possess great scientific and literary attainments.
