Angkor is made out of Phnom Kulen. More than fifty quarries on the south-eastern foot of this sandstone plateau, fifty kilometres northeast of Siem Reap in Cambodia, cut the blocks for the temples. Satellite imagery has since picked out a canal running from the quarry belt toward the building sites, a far shorter route than the overland haul long assumed. The plateau's streams still feed Angkor's rivers and reservoirs. It is also where the empire was declared: Jayavarman II had himself consecrated universal monarch up here in 802.
What brings Cambodians up the mountain now is the water. Where the Kulen river runs shallow across a broad sandstone shelf, the rock under your feet is carved with hundreds of lingas laid out in grids, and you wade in to see them properly. Pilgrims fill bottles below the carvings, because passing over that stone is what makes the water holy. They show best in the dry months, once the monsoon runoff has drained away. And the celebrated River of a Thousand Lingas that guidebooks promise is usually not this bed at all, but Kbal Spean across the massif. A little downstream the river drops fifteen to twenty metres into a broad pool — a brown roar in September and October, a modest curtain in the dry season. On any weekend it is full of Cambodian families, most of them swimming in their clothes. In the forest beyond the village a boulder was carved into an elephant twelve centuries ago, with lions and a bull around it. That ground was heavily mined and only the track has been cleared, so you go in with a guide. And a stair lined with vendors takes you up to a pagoda perched on one enormous block, whose crown was cut in the sixteenth century into an eight-metre reclining Buddha. It was laid on a mountain that had been Hindu holy ground for seven centuries by then. Inside it is close, dark and thick with incense, and the queue is almost entirely Cambodian: lotus flowers, folded banknotes, a monk's blessing with water.