From The Month.
Ancor-Viat—A New Giant City.
If any would-be discoverer of ancient monuments is envious of the laurels of Mr. Layard and other celebrities of the same class, let him at once set out by the overland route, and make his way as fast as he can to Ancor-Viat. Few people have yet heard of it, but if what is said of it be true, it must be simply the most stupendous collection of magnificent monuments in the world. If the traveller in Central America, who, like Mr. Stephens, quits the beaten tracks and plunges into the depths of vast forests, is amazed at the ruins of Copan, Palenque, Uxmal, and Chichen, with their huge truncated pyramids, palaces, corridors, and sculptured bas-reliefs, he would, it seems, be still more surprised if he extended his researches to the Empire of Annam, and, advancing toward the utmost boundary of Cambodia, where it skirts Thibet, he came, mounted on an elephant, to the gigantic temples and forests of marble pillars which mark the site of which we speak. It was thus that a French officer in the service of the King of Siam recently visited the spot; and the account he has given of it may be found in the Revue de l'Architecture, and is in great part reproduced in the Revue Contemporaine of December, 1866. No European writer before him has ever mentioned it, and in reading his letters we must make allowances for possible exaggeration. He is a mandarin of the third class, and has obtained the rank of general in command of the Siamese army. M. Perrin (for such is his name) proposes revisiting Ancor-Viat with a complete photographic apparatus; and when he has done this, and had given us the pleasure of examining his photographs, we shall be better able to judge of his veracity. Meanwhile the editor of the Revue Contemporaine is of opinion that the clearness and simplicity of his account leaves little room for doubting its truth.
When M. Perrin first visited Ancor-Viat, he saw nothing of its ancient splendor; for in "Indian China," as in Central America, monuments of large dimensions and great beauty are often unknown to the people who dwell within a few hundred yards of them. The concourse of intelligent and wealthy travellers alone teaches ignorant natives the value of their own surroundings. On his second journey M. Perrin's attention was directed to the ruins by a curious circumstance. The King of Kokien pays a yearly tribute to the King of Siam in kind, and among the articles saltpetre figures largely. In the whole of India beyond the Ganges—in the Birman Empire, Siam, Malacca, and Annam—the people, children-like, have a passion for fireworks, and consequently consume a large quantity of saltpetre. Now the excrement of bats and night-birds that haunt in great abundance the cities of the dead furnishes, it seems, a copious supply of this substance, and is, in fact, as fruitful in the production of squibs and rockets as guano—the dung of Peruvian sea-birds—is in the cultivation of corn and rye. It is collected by malefactors who work in chains, and is dissolved in water mixed with ashes. After some days the water and ashes, with the macerated dung strongly impregnated with ammonia, is passed through tight sieves, and exposed in big caldrons to the action of huge fires. The entire substance then evaporates leaving behind it crystals of saltpetre. The East was famous of old for the manufacture of nitre; and we have all have noticed how it forms spontaneously on the walls of stables, slaughter-houses, cellars, and the like, from the decomposition of animal matter, and even from the breath and sweat of beasts.
No wonder M. Perrin was struck as a foreigner by the strange spectacle of convicts collecting bird-dung. The birds of night have a strong affinity for ruins, and crumbling towers and terraces are—to use an expression of Virgil's—
"Dirarum nidis domus opportuna volucrum."
It was along the northern part of the great city of Ancor-Viat that M. Perrin halted frequently to watch the culprits of Cambodia plying their foul task. During six days of elephant march he travelled on without coming to the end of the city. Here and there be penetrated into the ruins where explorers had opened a passage. No one, he says, would believe him if he told all be saw. The monuments, the palaces, the temples, the pillars, stairs, and blocks of marble pass description. The circle of the ruins was computed by the people of the country at ten or twelve leagues in diameter. Now considering that London, with its three millions of inhabitants, measures about eleven miles from east to west, and that Ancor-Viat by this calculation covered about three times as much ground, there must have been a pretty large concourse of human beings under the shadow of its colossal halls. It may have been the capital of an empire; it may have been an empire in itself. There, doubtless, as in the ancient cities of Mexico, the rich and the great dwelt in spacious edifices, with gardens and groves enclosed, while the poorer sort herded together in huts like those of the rudest tribes of Indians. There were no parliaments and philanthropic societies then to look after the dwellings of the poor; as space was no object in those days, they made up for straitened accommodation at home by plenty of spare room for building within the walls. Subaltern officers in the British army in Ceylon, who have surveyed that island of late years, report cities of enormous size, and covered in with jungle, as inviting excavation. Anarajaphpoorra, they tell us, must have been larger than London, and Polonarooa (be indulgent to the spelling, ye students of Cingalee!) contains statues of Anak height. The recumbent Buddha in the last of these two cities is 24 feet in length, and the Buddhist temples, built of a kind of granite, are huge in proportion. What bullock-power and elephant-power it must have required to move blocks of stone so unwieldy in an age when machinery and engineering were unknown! What thews must these Titans have had, before the time of eastern effeminacy, to build their towers of uncemented ashlars piled up like "Pelion upon Ossa"! M. Perrin assures us that he saw in Ancor-Viat temples in a good state of preservation, but overrun with weeds and shrubs, which measured a league in circuit. Pillars rose around him on every side, tall as cedars, and all in marble. The stairs, though partly buried under the soil, still mounted much higher than the noble flights one sees at Versailles or on the Piazza di Spagna at Rome. The buildings in some places were as solid as if they had been raised yesterday. According to local tradition, they are four or five thousand years old; and yet, but for lightning and the overgrowth of luxuriant vegetation, they would even at this day be perfect and intact. "Oh! that I had brought a photographic apparatus with me!" exclaims this traveller. "I assure you, whether you believe it or no, that the most famous monuments ancient or modern which we can boast of are mere sheds compared with what I have seen: our palaces, our basilicas, the Vatican, Colosseum, and the like, are just dog-kennels to it, and nothing more!"
If we had never heard of the Indian cities of Central America which the tribes are supposed to have deserted six or seven hundred years ago, when warned by their priests of the coming of the Spaniards, we might feel disposed to reject M. Perrin's account as no less fabulous than the travels of Baron Munchausen. But when we follow the steps of Captain Del Rio and Captain Du Paix, and still more those of Mr. Stephens in Chiapas and Yucatan; when we see them working their way through dense forests in Honduras with fire and axe, and arriving at a wall six hundred feet long and from sixty to ninety in height, forming one side of an oblong enclosure called the Temple, while the other three sides are formed by a succession of pyramids and terraced walls that measure from thirty to a hundred and forty feet in height, we are not easily repelled by any report of ancient cities merely because the measurements in it run very high. There was a phase in the history of civilization when half barbarous races who knew not the use of iron, delighted in constructing lasting monuments, and made up for beauty of detail by huge proportions, and for writing and hieroglyphics by picture-painting. M. Perrin may be guilty of great exaggeration, but we ought not to charge him with it too hastily. Modern research has more than verified all that the Spaniards vaguely reported of the cities of the West, where immense artificial mounds are crowned with stately palaces, and the dauntless industry of former races is proved by the provision they made for water supply in a dry and thirsty land—by the vast reservoirs for water which have been excavated, and are found to be paved and lined with stone—by the pits around the ponds intended to furnish supplies or water when the upper basin was empty in the height of summer—by the wells hidden deep in the rock, and reached by the patient water-carriers by pathways cut in the mountain to a depth or 450 feet, and conducting them to that depth by windings 1400 feet in length—by the long ladders, made of rough rounds of wood and bound together with osiers, up which the Indians carried, and still carry, on their backs from these deep sources the water requisite for the consumption of 7,000 persons or more, according to the size of the villages, during four months of the year—and by the subterranean chambers, which the Indians of old probably used as granaries for maize, and which were made, like the ingenious cisterns just spoken of, by slaves obedient to more intelligent masters. These and similar discoveries in America add a color of probability to the description M. Perrin has given of Ancor-Viat in Asia. At the same time we would rather he had not forgotten his photographic machine.
"I was anxious," he says, "to ascend to a temple that seemed tolerably perfect. There were eleven staircases, of I know not how many stairs each, to reach the first five only of peristyles! I began climbing at half-past six in the morning, and at half-past seven I had barely been able to examine two or three of the lower apartments. I was obliged to shorten my stay, fearing that I should have to descend the stairs while the sun was hot. All the walls are sculptured and ornamented. The first effect the ruins produced on me was that of stupefaction. Yet I am not a man to cry out with astonishment at trifles. The following day I went up by a winding staircase to the top of an immense tower situated on a height, from whence I enjoyed a good view of the surrounding remains. In hollows and parts where one cannot penetrate there are palaces of colossal height and grandeur. I had an excellent opera-glass, and could observe the details. An untold store of architectural treasures was before me, stretching as far as the frontier of Cambodia, which is ten or twelve leagues off! Just think what Paris would be in ruins. Heaps of stones and ashlars scattered over a surface no more than two or three leagues in diameter. Here there is on the ground, and under the ground, marble, already hewn, enough to build after the fashion of giants all the cities in the universe!"