Lin Carter - Jandar 06, page 1
Lankar of Callisto - Jandar 06 Lin Carter
Chapter 1
THE CITY IN THE JUNGLE
It was early afternoon when we landed at the Siem Reap airport just north of the capital city. We had to wait in interminable lines to collect our luggage and to go through passport examination and customs inspection. Eventually we emerged under a darkening sky to be greeted by grinning pedicab-drivers who shrilled out the names of hotels, vying with each other for our trade. We selected one cheerful little man from the line who greeted us in a comical mixture of French and Cambodian.
“Bonsoir, lok!”-which meant “good evening, mistef’-he called. I think Noel was attracted to him because of his smile, which was gleaming and colorful. I mean that quite literally, by the way, for his teeth were inlaid with gold and plaques of red carnelian. The Cambodian natives, it seems, regard white teeth as bad luck, and while the poor peasants color them by chewing on betel nut, those who can afford to do so have their teeth set with gold fillings or with semiprecious stones like lapis or carnelian, or even with jewels.
Babbling merrily in at least three languages, our driver heaped the luggage on the rack and we climbed in and settled ourselves while he mounted the rear of the vehicle, taking a running start, and steered us smoothly into the flow of traffic. These pedicabs look like an odd hybrid of bicycle and the traditional rickshaw and most of the street traffic of the Cambodian capital is composed of them, since gasoline has recently become very expensive due to shortages and the cutoff of foreign imports. “Legs are cheaper than gas,” is the saying here.
For a time we were pedaled along a narrow country road beside a muddy yellow waterway. Naked brown boys scrubbing dusty elephants amid the stream waved and catcalled as we went clicking by; grimacing gibbons chattered from tall stands of bamboo that rattled and clattered in the spanking breeze; birds with red plumage screeched from immense banyans or fragrant lemon-groves. We saw entire families up to their knees in the muddy water, scooping up silver, wriggling fish in wicker buckets. Occasionally the waterway widened and we saw stately, if clumsy, wooden junks competing with all manner of rivercraft for right of way-everything from bamboo rafts to rusty packet boats, loud motorboats scooting by graceful crafts that looked for all the world like Venetian gondolas. Far off downstream a huge oil tanker stood at dock.
Before long we entered the city proper and moved through narrow streets lined with open-air shops which sold an amazing profusion of odd merchandise-wrought-silver elephants, gongs, bamboo flutes, paper good-luck flags, incense sticks, betelnuts, begging bowls of polished wood, dogmeat sausages (at which we shuddered), modern Chinese comic books. Buddhist monks strolled the sidewalks in their saffron robes under yellow parasols. Old women with shaven heads went by, wrapped from armpit to ankle in black sarongs called sampots, with spotless white blouses. Mobs of ragamuffin children were everywhere, chewing sugarcane-the local equivalent of lollypops-lugging shoeshine kits, begging for pennies, munching on sunflower seeds. Fortune-tellers squatted on the sidewalks, a jumble of mystic books, copper amulets and magical herbs spread out before them on pieces of oilcloth. Most of the traffic was composed of pedicabs similar to the one in which we rode, which are called cyclos; there were very few automobiles to be seen.
Noel had brought along a street map ofPhnom Penh which she had been studying on the plane while I read Jandar’s manuscript; so we were able to follow our progress through the city easily enough. Phnom
Penh is a city of many waters, laid out so that it straddles the intersection of theTonle Sap and theBassacRiver , where they merge with an elbow of the mightyMekong which empties into the ocean one hundred and thirty miles downstream. This intersection, called the quatre bras, the “four arms,” is like a great ‘X’ of water, and most of the local transportation is by means of the various rivers, canals and suchlike. The country itself is quite small, covering 66,000 square miles, about the size of the state ofWashington back home. The capital is rather small, in keeping with about four hundred thousand inhabitants.
We entered the Boulevard Norodom, a broad tree-lined avenue. Here for the first time we saw
automobiles in number, mostly small foreign imports I could not name. Our driver, pedaling away behind us, called our attention to a local landmark, the famous Wat Phnom, a tapering, battered, weather-beaten, spire-topped shrine which rises atop a wooded hill near the approximate center of the city, gained by a wide flight of stone steps. We passed by it close enough to see the stone seven-headed cobras that adorned its roof. “Wat Phnom” means “HillTemple,” and the legend has it that six centuries ago when rainy season floodwaters arose, they washed the trunk of a great koki tree up this hill to the doorstep of a lady named Penh. Inside the tree were found four bronze images of the Buddha, and the omen was interpreted to mean the gods had withdrawn their favor from the old imperial capital, the famous jungle metropolis of Angkor, and were searching for a new home. Rumors of the miracle spread and a fair-sized town grew up rapidly around the central hill whereon lived Lady Penh, who built the spired temple to house the idols. Later, when an invasion fromThailand overranAngkor , the king of that day moved south, settling here, making this his capital. The city has been known asPhnom Penh , “the Hill of Lady Penh,” ever since.
We reached the waterfront where we were supposed to meet Sir Malcolm’s head boy, checked our luggage in a riverside passenger station, paid our cyclo-driver, tipping him handsomely, and, as we had plenty of time to spare, decided on an early dinner. The station manager, or dockmaster, or whatever he was, spoke a fair bit of English, recommending the center of the local nightlife, an establishment called le Bar Jean, where the local members of the French colony meet for cocktails, conversation and continental cuisine. Noel demurred, preferring something more Cambodian to French; the stationmaster told us how to find the Lotus d’Or, a floating restaurant serving traditional Vietnamese dishes, which had originally been built as a movie set.
We set out on our own. The steep golden yellow roofs of the Throne Hall, reserved for coronations, gleamed in the fires of sunset; paper lanterns bobbled from bamboo rods above open-air shops inwardly lit by kerosene lamps; colored paper good-luck flags fluttered from doorsills as we passed, displaying a bizarre bestiary-the half-human Garuda bird, the three-faced god Chak Kboun, fantastically colored elephants, and a green-faced giant named Pipchek, borrowed from Hindu myth. Eager-faced urchins, who could spot a “wealthy” tourist ten miles off, vied to escort us to local monuments like the great Preah Morokoe pagoda with its famous floor of solid silver tiles. There was certainly a motley throng filling the lamplit streets, among them a surprising preponderance of terribly respectable-looking Chinese businessmen in neat, gray Western business suits, with narrow, black conservative ties. Since about a third ofPhnom Penh ’s citizens are Chinese, and since they control most of the trade and own nearly all of the shops, I suppose this wasn’t really surprising.
The city was crowded and colorful, a place where many different cultures meet and mingle. Along Rue Khemarak Phoumin-over which garish paper banners advertise soccer games and boxing matches to the sports-mad Cambodians-there is a restaurant serving a traditional Chinese menu, crossed, in a most unlikely fashion, with a French sidewalk cafe. But we finally settled on a seedy little eating-place which offered Cambodian dishes and even a headwaiter who spoke English. Shunning the dogmeat sausages, Noel asked about a dish called chong roet, which turned out to be live locusts or cicadas broiled over pans of charcoal.
We settled on roast trei chkowk, a local variety of lake chub roasted crisp and tender over a pot of charcoal, served up on a bed of steaming rice. It was tangy and delicious, topped off with heady Cambodian tea served in curious wooden pots, with ansamcheks for dessert-rice cakes with banana centers, wrapped in leaves and served piping hot. The restaurant was crowded and noisy, sawdust on the floor and odorous of fish-heads. Pretty girls in gorgeous sarongs twirled in the national folk dance, called the lamthon, in a kind of floor show; they were followed by musicians who played eight-stringed gares, a native orchestra of gongs and flutes and instruments called tros which look like one-stringed violins. We ate hugely, enjoyed ourselves enormously, and the bill came to a staggering thirty riels, which
was about ninety cents American.
After supper we went strolling among the shops. Noel wanted to pick up a few souvenirs to bring home as gifts for her sister, the Jellerette children across the street, and our next-door neighbors, the Roethers, who were usually kind enough to collect our mail and newspapers for us when we were off on trips. She also hoped to find something nice for Marie Cerut, a local antique dealer with whom she had struck up a close friendship.
“Keep your eyes open for something to bring back for Ron Stoloff,” she said, referring to the President of the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society, whose guests we would be at the annual Philcon the following month.
Everywhere we went we saw clear evidence that this was a country at war. Military vehicles were to be seen moving through the streets or parked at corners, and there were many Cambodians in uniform, some of them carrying weapons, mingling with the crowds along the street. The recent explosion of rebel action in the outlying provinces and the dangers of an attempted Communist take-over of the new Lon Nol government had caused our State Department to be more than a little reluctant to permit Noel and me to have passports forCambodia . Obviously, Uncle didn’t like the idea ofU.S. citizens getting into a Southeast Asian country at war, for fear of American nationals getting mixed up in what might be an international incident. While we were in the capital, though, we didn’t see any evidence of trouble, although once we got out on the river and down into the jungle regions, we might expect a little more danger.
Well, we had determined to take our chances on that, and hoped that everything turned out all right.
The streets were very crowded by now, and made a gorgeous and exotic sight, lit by swaying paper lanterns, colored lights shining on strange brown faces, gilded wood, signs in curious characters. I wished we had more time to sample the nightlife, but we did not.
Back on the dock we found our transportation awaiting us, in the form of a rusty, patched, decrepit little steam-launch that was a dead ringer for the dilapidated craft Humphrey Bogart captained in one of our favorite movies, The African Queen. Sir Malcolm’s number-one boy, Charlie Phuong, had already located and loaded our luggage aboard. He was a short, cheerful, grinning, bowlegged boy of indeterminate age, who carried his life’s savings around with him in the form of a wide grin bright with gold fillings. Sparkling black eyes greeted us under the bill of a battered old baseball cap, around which a scrap of fluttering red scarf had been knotted for good luck, or to keep the devils away, or maybe both. The rest of his costume consisted of muddy tennis shoes, a ragged pair of khaki shorts, and a cast-off olive drab army shirt.
The moon had risen while we were at dinner, and the river traffic was at its pitch as we cast off, chugging noisily, into the main channel. Brightly lit sampans and junks floated by us; boats of every description were loading at docks heaped with tins of pitch, bales of raw, unprocessed rubber from the great Chup plantations to the northeast of the capital. We saw workmen, naked to the waist, laboring under flaring torches at sacks of fragrant yieng yieng bark from which incense is made, shoving about baskets filled with garish peppercorns, stalks of green bananas, bundles of peacock feathers, cords of cut bamboo, bundles of turtle shells, anteater skins and kapok. Amusingly, one boat was unloading cases of Coca Cola bottles.
Our boat threaded its noisy path through an arrangement of mud dikes, canal locks, and waterways. Wooden cowbells went click-clack in fields beside the river; oil lamps gleamed in the waxed paper windows of farmhouses and huts as we sailed downriver under star-crowded skies. Peasants worked late in flooded, shallow ricefields, bent double and looming like black cutouts against the moon. We sailed past bamboo forests, lemon groves, ungainly stands of banana trees, and thick banyans. In one hillside farm a clumsy Zadrugar tractor, imported from Yugoslavia, rumbled, belching black, oily smoke.
Noel and I struck up a conversation with our friendly pilot. Charlie Phuong, it turned out, was not a native of Phnom Penh but hailed from a hamlet with the delicious name of Battangbang, which I gathered was the capital of the northwestern province. He had nothing but contempt and derision for the locals hereabouts, whom he considered city slickers, more interested in organized sports, movies from Hong, Kong, and political squabbles, than in the traditional elements of Cambodian life. He was very uneducated and very superstitious, what with his crimson head scarf to frighten off night-wandering demons, and the copper bracelet he wore clasped about one muscular brown bicep which was a good-luck charm. He chattered in friendly, amiable fashion while we glided down the star-mirroring river, which widened. He had worked nearly a calendar year for Sir Malcolm, whom he held in good-humored veneration-his name for the British archaeologist was Lok Thom, which means something like “Mr. Big”-and, although uneducated, he had picked up a surprising vocabulary in English: pungent, earthy, shot through with French cuss-words and the names of Cambodian deities and demons, all mixed together in a patois so inimitable I will not even attempt to reproduce it in these pages.
We passed something like an enormous, densely black, floating island, around the edge of which Charlie Phuong maneuvered the laboring little steam-launch while purpling the night air with a torrent of profanity in at least three languages. This floating island turned out to be a logjam, drifting downstream from the forest around Kratie. Native lumberjacks, only their red, devil-frightening head-scarves visible in the gloom, scampered nimbly about this gigantic raft of logs, keeping careful eyes peeled to be certain the heavy hardwood logs of teak were buoyed up on hollow bamboo trunks.
I smoked cigarette after cigarette, sitting in the prow, staring dreamily out on the starry skies, the moonlit river, and the jungle thickets which lined the river to each side; Noel dozed in the rear, pillowed on our luggage. The trip would take hours.
Then I must have dozed off myself, for the next thing I knew was Charlie Phuong grinning down at me, gold fillings glittering in the torchlight, shaking me awake. I stretched and sat up and looked about me.
We were pulled over to one shore of the river, where a crude little log-built dock thrust out on sunken pilings a few yards into the stream. The dock was crowded with small, nimble men passing our luggage ashore, each snatching a bag and tossing it into the waiting hands of the next.
Then a spry, sixtyish, little man with bright, inquisitive blue eyes and a goatee of silvery white, his scrawny form clad in filthy khaki shorts and a mud-besplattered T-shirt, popped up directly in front of me, squinted about, spotted me, and grinned-a grin which made his entire leather-tanned face dissolve into a mass of laughter-crinkles.
“Mr. Carter, I gather?” I nodded, still half-asleep. He rubbed bony hands together briskly.
“Excellent! Excellent! And your charming lady, I see. Well, hop out-hop out-you’re here, you know! Welcome to the city of Arangkor; population twenty-six-now twenty-eight! It’s a five minute stroll through the brush-watch your step, dear lady, or you’ll go up to your waist in mud-the dock we built for a reason, you know! Come-Billy-Boy, my cook, has fresh tea brewing, or instant coffee, if you prefer . .
. come along now. Careful with the gentleman’s luggage, you clumsy monkeys!”
And he bustled into the line of laborers, vanishing in the dark.
So it was that at last I met Sir Malcolm Jerrolds, distinguished author of Unsolved Mysteries of Asia
(Macmillan, 1964), Excavating the Gobi (Cassels, 1966), and A Preliminary Report on the Arangkor Discoveries (unpublished).
And so it was, also, five or six minutes later, at the end of a muddy trail cut through some of the densest and least-explored jungles on this planet, that I came to Arangkor itself-mystery-city of the vanished Khymer-Kings, lost city of the ages.
Chapter 2
CONSEQUENCES OF TAKING A STROLL
“Not much to be seen by night, of course-great pity-splendid sight by daylight, I assure you-more tea, missus?” the little, gnomelike man chirped briskly. Noel accepted a tin cup of the steaming beverage with a smile; I nursed a similar container filled with a rank, bitter brew Billy-Boy mistakenly considered to be coffee, preoccupied with staring around me in a bemused fashion.
This tea party was being held, incongruously, on worn camp-chairs amidst a plaza of broken stony slabs where once, our spry little host assured us, the ancient God-Kings of fabulous Kambudja had held open-air court.
Stone buildings loomed to every side, heavily-carved, fantastic sculptures edged with moon-silver. Birds squawked in the jungle night; monkeys screeched; somewhere, far off, a water buffalo bellowed lustily.
Noel was interrogating Sir Malcolm on archaeological methods; I was too bone-weary, despite the bitter black coffee, sweetened with curdled, faintly soursmelling condensed milk, and too heavy-eyed, to do much but sip the stuff, smoke, and stare around me.
