The visit to Beng Mealea goes over the temple rather than through it. One of the largest sanctuaries the Khmer Empire ever raised, it stands in the forest east of Angkor, in northern Cambodia, with no founding inscription and no known builder, and it was never put back up. What you cross is an avalanche stopped in place: lintels, columns and roof blocks lying exactly where they came down. The ceilings went before the walls did. Khmer builders never used the true arch — they stacked sandstone inward, course by course, until the two sides met overhead — and that kind of roof holds only while every block stays put. Once roots worked into the joints and the ground settled beneath them, whole galleries unzipped at once.
A wooden walkway carries you over the worst of it, and it was never meant to be there: a film crew put it up in 2004 and left it standing when the shoot ended. It runs along the spine of the temple, and the temple itself is off it. With a guide you step down and the visit turns into a climb, hauling yourself through gaps between blocks the size of cars, into galleries dark enough that the roots come as a surprise. Carved women still keep watch on the inner walls, framed by lichen and by roots hanging down over the stone like slack rope. Some of the faces are already half taken. The ones still clear carry the sharp, unhurried detail that tells you this was a first-rank temple, not a provincial one. It was never an outpost, either: the road came before the temple. Beng Mealea stood at the head of the royal highway running east out of Angkor, beside the quarries whose sandstone built Angkor itself. In the dry months the blocks are firm enough to climb; by September the monsoon has brought the moss back and the whole collapse runs green. At the head of the eastern causeway a many-headed stone serpent still rears where its builders set it, one of the few things here that never moved.