'Naga, the snake, is a stone prophecy. The ghosts of the men who linked, by means of Naga's stone body, one pinnacled gateway with another, must know now what they meant - now that the forest, many-headed, many-mouthed like Naga, has devoured their treasure. Naga, in the light of the moon, challenges strangers and binds them with a spell. Naga's monstrous taut body along the broad causeways leads strangers away and away from everything neat and known. Come along...come along...stranger...let the lions throw out their silly stone chests for the admiration of the crazy palms...let the fish mumble among the little green sequins of weeds upon the pools...let the bats, blurs of silver, swing and shimmer and mew against the frosted sky at the top of the broken tower...come, stranger, the night is short...Naga's heads are reared at the end of the wide way, arrogantly and finally. Look now...this is my Angkor, my treasure...you shall share a treasure with me and the forest...The holy place is propped on a precipice of insanely steep steps, so steep that the moonlight shuns the slopes of that fierce hill, and touches only the three proud horns that toss the stars...'
from Journey in Indo-China, a piece in The Little World by Stella Benson
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