# The Downfall of the Gods

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THE DOWNFALL OF THE GODS
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By the same Author
IN DAYS THAT ARE DEAD. A Volume of Stories.
MALAYAN MONOCHROMES. A Volume of Stories.
THE GOLD COAST REGIMENT IN THE EAST AFRICAN CAMPAIGN.
HEROES OF EXILE. Being Certain Rescued Fragments of Submerged Romance.
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THE DOWNFALL OF THE GODS
By HUGH CLIFFORD, G.C.M.G., G.B.E.
Malayan Civil Service
LONDON
JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET, W.
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​First Printed April, 1911
Reprinted May, 1911
Reprinted March, 1928
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TO
BETTY
THIS, THE FIRST BOOK THAT I HAVE WRITTEN, IS INSCRIBED.
This is my Lady's praise: God, after many days, Wrought her in unknown ways In sunset lands; This was my Lady's birth: God gave her might and mirth, And laid His whole sweet earth Between her hands.
Swinburne.
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## CONTENTS

FOREWORD
I was at Phnom Penh, the capital of modern Kambodia, the which is a Protectorate of France, ruled by a French Resident, in the name of its aged king. I had just quitted Angkor, after many days passed among its temples, and the spell of its magic was still upon me. Yonder, up the dismal river which flows from the Great Lake, behind the thick curtain of almost deserted forest, I had dwelt in a solitude, hardly broken, amid things ancient and wonderful. Here, in a place one half of which is a modern French town, I was jarred by the incongruity which results from grafting on to the gnarled trunk of Asia, the rank products of latter-day Europe. I sought loneliness and peace. I wanted to think, to meditate upon all that I had seen at Angkor, and upon all that I had learned of its tragic history. I wanted to get once more into tune with the Asia of olden days, away from the noise inseparable from its ​invasion by the West; and thus I came, at the close of day, to the foot of the stairway that leads up the face of the Phnom, to the pagoda which crowns it.
To the north, south and west, and east, across the waters of the Mekong, the country lay spread out in an endless flat, clothed by the dingy greens and blues and blacks of its vegetation; but immediately around the Phnom were the lawns and shrubberies of the trim public gardens, set with iron cages, in which were pent a few leopards and many woebegone wildfowl.
And to me, these things—the pagoda, the wild creatures of the forest, the aged king yonder in his palace, the neat gardens, the cages, the sentry-guarded French Residency on the river's brink—were symbols—symbols of the Great Captivity.
Immediately before me, a long flight of brick steps ran upward between twin balustrades, fashioned in the likeness of the seven-headed cobra of the Brahmans. The rounded bodies of these monsters formed the balustrades themselves; the seven up-reared heads, fanning out into a single menacing cobra-hood, rose one on each side of the stairway's base; the pointed tails writhed into the air, against the sky, high above me.
​At the top of the stairway, plots of smooth grass surrounded the sacred places, and tipped abruptly down steep banks into masses of clustering bushes. By these the detestable, immaculate gardens were mercifully hidden.
Here, in awful, veiled seclusion, dwelt the most ancient of the gods of the East.
In the foreground rose the pagoda, brilliant with gold-leaf and many coloured tiles, its roof ornamented by long, branching, outward-curving horns, touched by the rays of the sunset and striking a note of gaiety, blithe and joyous. Behind it—the immense, solid base almost in contact with its threshold—stood the great dagoba, a ponderous mass of grey stone and rust-coloured lichen, tapering to a tall and delicate spire, that led the eye up and up, and the heart heavenward. It, too, struck its individual note sombre, awful, and austere.
It was as though the pagoda and dagoba in combination were designed to offer to the Gods all the joys and all the sorrows that fill or oppress the heart of man.
The head of the stairway, the plinth of the dagoba, and each angle of its base were guarded by alternate giants and lions, carved massively in stone, those about the obelisk rising one above the other in outstanding tiers. The giants were ​monsters with sinister faces, stout of trunk and limb, reposing big, folded hands on the grips of grounded pollard-clubs. The lions were the heraldic lions of Asia, posturing in ungainly fashion, with out-thrust buttocks, bodies wonderfully foreshortened, the legs of a jibbing horse, and uplifted, ferocious heads. Yet, in some subtle way, the very grotesqueness of these distorted effigies of man and beast—grim, motionless, impassive—enhanced the dignity and the solemnity of this refuge of the ancient gods.
In the west, over the flat, half-submerged country, visible above the dense shrubberies, the day was dying in a wonderful blaze of colour; the heavens above-invaded in many directions by great waves of crimson—displaying a purity of azure, in startling contrast to the vivid green streaks, inset about the furnace-mouth of the horizon. In the east, across the dull red flood of the river, a moon near the full was rising from a bed of rosy cloud-fleece, its orb delicately tinted by the reflected glow of sunset.
Between sun and moon was uplifted the dark and shadowy pyramid of the dagoba, with its grim wardens dimly seen.
A big, black lizard thrust its diamond-shaped head forth from a cranny between two huge stones, and scarred the stillness with its loud, ​discordant outcry. Then again a great hush fell.
I had found that for which I had been seeking. This was the East—the real East, mysterious and very ancient-waiting with her immense and measureless patience to catch the awful whisper that shall reveal the secrets of life and birth and death. For she is ever expectant—the East; never weary, never faithless, waiting—waiting always—for the whisper that does not come.
The sadness of the last hour of day—perhaps the saddest thing in all the immeasurable sadness of the East—brooded over the darkening land like some vast, menacing shadow.
The earth, faint with spent energies, drowsed and dreamed amid the soft glamour of the twilight, wrapped about by airs heavy and wearın, velvet-soft and fragrant.
Yet the stillness of that quiet place was like an anxious heart-beat.
And here, alone in this ancient sanctuary, watching the dying day, I pieced together from the fragmentary knowledge, which the research of others had furnished to me, this story of the Downfall of the Gods.
My gropings and searchings among the scattered wreckage of a once mighty civilisation, my sojourn amid the deserted temples of a once great people's ​worship, had set me dreaming of the Past; forced my imagination to fearful probings of the Future; for these things told, in silent, grim mockery, of the changing, unchanging fate of gods and empires.
Hugh Clifford.