Visions of Angkor

IT WAS A WARM, clear evening, and American art historian Dawn Rooney was waiting for the sun to set over the ancient buildings of Angkor Wat.

She was alone, sitting on the highest pinnacle of the highest temple, where 1,000 years before only kings and high priests would have been allowed and she found herself 'wondering what Euro-peans would have thought about this 100 years ago. Would they have heard the cicadas like this; would they have seen the bats flying around the temple?'

At that point she decided to find out, and the result, three decades later, is Angkor Observed (White Orchid Press, $195), a wonderful atmospheric book of travellers' tales that will be published next month.

Rooney's first stop was the library at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. To her amazement she found archives full of unpublished diaries written by foreigners who had visited Angkor and Southeast Asia over the past century and a half. There were English, Dutch and American travellers, and of course most of all there were French, men mostly who had seen this extraordinary place, and had written vividly about their adventures in the city that had been the capital of the Khmer empire from the late ninth century to the middle of the 15th.

If she could have travelled with one of them, which one would she have chosen? Henri Mouhot she says, without hesitation. 'He was the first one to make his way there overland - except for the Jesuit priests. And their diaries were so exclusive to the Church that the public didn't hear about them.' Mouhot did not 'discover' Angkor, she emphasises - it has been a controversial point in Angkor's recent history - but his diaries and drawings, published after his death, did a great deal to help 19th-century Europeans and Ameri-cans discover it in their imaginations.

Mouhot must have presented a rather unusual vision to any Cambodian who caught sight of him in the winter of 1859 tromping through the jungle with his butterfly nets, binoculars and bearers carrying his extensive trunks of books and clothes, watercolours and scientific instruments.