one waiting to meet us and number two at our side.

On the following morning before there was pink in the east we started down the straight, French road with one headlight working, the Cambodian chauffeur, who spoke no French, driving as if the devil were after him and the Cambodian mécanicien holding the machine together with both hands and one foot. When the sun rose, the road stretched straight ahead of us through jungle, fields, and swamp. We sped on until 10:30, when we reached a few desolate fishermen's huts, where we transferred to sampans, the Sisophon, the chaloupe which was to take us across the lake, being unable to come in to shore.

We sailed out into the great lake, without a compass, but guided, I suppose, by the occasional stretches of submerged forest which showed on the horizon and, for a while, by distant hills; and, trusting in Providence, we came well before sunset within reach of the opposite shore.

Then we transferred to a sampan propelled by larger people than those we had seen farther south. The faces were kindly and the dark muscular bodies like moving bronze. The costume con

sisted of a cotton cloth draped like a skirt which hung from the waist to the knee and was gathered in a knot in front. The barbaric designs in these cotton cloths we greatly admired as fine examples of native workmanship

until, on closer examination, we discovered the printed words "Made in Manchester."

At the landing, just at sunset, we found a motor truck to take us the final twenty miles to Angkor.

Of all the picturesque things we had seen until then there was nothing that approached that ride in picturesqueness. The road was a sort of dike through the swamps, bordered with huge trees of a kind we had not observed before, whose smooth trunks rose straight and gigantic into the darkness like the trees of California.

We knew that the little French bungalow in which we passed the night faced Angkor-Vat, the great temple which is the best preserved of all the ruins and one of the mightiest, most elaborate structures ever built upon the earth; and the following morning, when the first light was coming into the east and Madame was quieted in sleep, the other six of us went out to the terrace to see the sun rise behind those strange, titanic towers left desolate ages ago by a people vanished from the earth.

B

EFORE us was a great moat filled with nenuphars and purple water hyacinths; across that stretched a causeway of huge gray slabs of stone with parapets shaped like colossal cobras rearing massive hoods on each of which were sculptured seven heads, this peculiar form of decoration being called, after the Hindu snake god, a "Naga." Beyond the causeway and the moat were gray, interminable galleries, the side toward us upheld by columns, and the other side, as we knew, bearing on every inch the sculptured records of old wars. Back of the gallery, their bases hidden by it, rose the towers of the far-off inner temple, huge masses of stone built into a shape unknown elsewhere, I believe, and possibly phallic in origin. Beside us and behind us stretched interminable forests filled with birds.

We lingered long on the terrace, robed

in our dressing-gowns and pajamas, and when we finally came to breakfast Madame had wandered off alone to see the sights.

As for us, we went down the great causeway, up a brief flight of stone steps, and through the portico of the sculptured gallery, to see stretching ahead of us, far and gray, another massive causeway twice the length of the first. At the farther end rose another flight of stone steps twice the height, and beyond that the central courtyard, flanked with four great towers, in the midst of which rose a third steep flight double the height of the second and leading to what was the inner sanctuary immediately under the fifth and greatest of the towers.

Once every foot of that mountain of stone which is Angkor-Vat had been covered with carving-innumerable Apsâras, sculptured stories from the Ramayana; Vishnu, Shiva, with the other gods of the Brahman Pantheon, and around them all delicate traceries of intricate, ever-varying design, panels that suggested now the French Renaissance, now the Alhambra, and now the patterns of Chinese or Indian craftsmen. Once in the inner sanctuary sat Brahma himself enthroned, looking out across the forest to that lost city of AngkorThom, which could easily have held within its walls the Rome of Nero. Then came Buddhism-slow, insinuating, making converts, if the theories of archæologists are correct, of the million slaves who served the Khmer lords; then (who knows when?) a sudden rebellion-the Buddhist slaves against the Brahman masters-an orgy of willful destruction, the placing of Buddhist images in the shrines, a period of swift decay during which a Chinese traveler came to see the golden lotos of Gautama surmounting the great gray towers of the harsher cult, and to leave the only known record of what Angkor was. After that the forests reclaimed their own; a few Buddhist monks lingered on in Angkor-Vat through the generations, keeping that in somewhat better preservation than the fallen palaces and the other temples, where great trees pushed upward and outward through the masonry and rose sometimes with their billowing green from the very tops of the towers.

In 1907 the French took it from Siam, and since then, with the perfect genius of their race, trees have been taken down in sections, inch by inch, fallen stones have been placed upright again, the forest has been pushed back from Angkor-Vat, and now slowly, week by week, the other monuments of that great vanished empire are being discovered and re-established; the swift destruction caused by man and the slow destruction of the centuries being overcome by imagination and patient labor. All that afternoon and the following morning M. Goloubew, one of the archæologists in charge, went with us, showing us the extraordinary temple of Bayon, where the enormous heads of

Brahma, with their strange smile, have been so massive as to survive all attempts at destruction, the work that had been done in recent years; and, most fascinating of all, leading us out to places that were just being uncovered, where the ground was literally strewn with fragments of old bronze and pottery, and where just before he had picked up in the grasses an undamaged bronze figurine. All of us would have been ready to enlist under him with picks and shovels; for we walked among fallen statues only half buried and knew what a treasure was beneath our feet. In fact, M. Goloubew would be an ideal person under whom to work, for his imagination had recreated and could picture for us the vanished life as Flaubert did that of Carthage, and he is, besides, a trained archæologist who once served his apprenticeship in the caves of Ajanta and is familiar with life in the jungle.

But how describe Ta Prom? Most of the roofs were gone; gigantic trees shot up among the statues and the carved columns, stretching huge octopus roots over fallen gods and tumbled colonnades; whole pillars, even whole door

ways and bulks of masonry, would sometimes be surrounded and held upright by one of these strange, banyan-like trees, the native name for which is spong. Parts of Ta Prom are erect in their old positions with the arabesques of their pillars unspoiled, the Apsâras and snake goddesses still in their places; other parts are a mass of fallen monoliths under which panthers lurk through the daytime, and over all are the great smooth-trunked trees filled with innumerable birds of brilliant plumage, and large, long-tailed monkeys making incredible leaps among the branches.

Pompeii is small and unimpressive compared with Angkor, and farther in the jungle are oases of romance to some of which we went by bullock-cart and elephant-places of utter ruin that cannot be described here.

One thing, however, I must attempt to describe. We had heard that the indigènes had curious traditional dances, and an evening at the native theater in Phnom-Penh having increased our interest, we summoned the Elder of the vil lage, a person of apparently fabulous age, who knew the old words and mo

tions of the dances and had taught them in his turn to those who now are young. Through him arrangements were made, the news was spread about the countryside, and on the appointed evening we had the privilege of witnessing a spectacle of surpassing strangeness and beauty. By the time darkness set in two or three hundred shadowy figures were crouching outside our little hotel. When we were ready, torches were lighted, a long procession was formed with us in the midst, and moved flowing over the great gray causeway with its serpent balustrades, on to the portico, over the second and longer causeway, to pause finally on a broad platform under the very shadow of the temple itself. There mats were spread on the old gray stones and the torch-bearers ranged themselves in a circle about them. Musicians with strange instruments were squatting at one side.

We took our places, the musicians moved to their instruments, and, oh, unescapable horror of nationality, struck up in our honor "Marching Through Georgia"! The careful French do not organize temple dances, but how that

tune got into the Siamese jungle or what the ghosts in the temple thought of it I cannot say. As soon, however, as the unfortunate prelude was over we were back again in the realm of romance. Indra appeared and the Demon

King, in the very costumes and with the same peculiar motions represented in the sculptures; and it suddenly came over me that this dance and the old Brahman traditions had survived the centuries of Buddhist domination and the encroachments of the forest. It was late when the dance was ended. The procession formed again with the torches fluttering out; we were led across the first great causeway, where, turning to look back on the massive shadowy temple, we saw burning far up in the central tower a light before the golden Buddha that is now enthroned there. When we passed over the second causeway, the torches shone dim on the moat with its sleeping nenuphars, and at the door of the hotel the silent procession was merged again into the darkness from which it had come.

temple inclosure, the causeway, and the moat to the forest which stretched away on every side to the horizon. When the clouds took on their first flush of color and the base of the great pile lay in shadow, the crescent moon came out above us; the shadow slowly crept upward, up from the base to where the golden Buddha sat with fire-perpetual burning before him, and as it passed, suddenly there was music. One of our party, who had a trained voice full of

feeling, had never sung so well before. Through the gray, twilit colonnades, around carved Apsâras and battle scenes of forgotten kingdoms, billowed the sound through perfect stillness-the strange exotic intervals of "Aïda," the "Chanson Indoue" of Rimsky-Korsakov, the lament of Orpheus, and, finally, as the tropical twilight grew swiftly deeper and the great stars blazed out above the fading sunset, the voice of the invisible singer flowed out in the "Visi d'Arte."

Silently then each of us made his offering to the Buddha, remembering as well the older vanished gods for whom that gray mountain of stone had been erected; and when we had found our way down the incredibly steep flights of steps worn by the feet of forgotten centuries, turning, we saw once more, far above us, the eternal fire burning, like the jewel on Buddha's brow among the crowning towers that loomed dark and massive against the stars.

L

AST March The Outlook offered ten prizes for the best ten letters of about six hundred words from college undergraduates on intercollegiate athletics. With the offer we made the following comment:

There are a lot of questions which we think our readers would like to ask the undergraduate. Here are some of them:

What is the place of athletics in education? What constitutes the amateur spirit? Is it worth preserving? Is it endangered by proselyting? By athletic "scholarships"? By professionalism?

Is too much emphasis, or too little, placed upon sport? Upon victory? Upon championships?

Should the present system of intercollegiate athletics be modified? How? Should the undergraduate have more, or less, to say concerning coaching methods? Eligibility rules?

Schedules?

What does the undergraduate think of the ethical standards and attitude of sport writers? What does he think of newspaper publicity? Huge expenditures for stadiums and transcontinental tours?

Those who try for our prizes should not try to answer all-they need not try to answer any-of these questions. They are merely offered as suggestions concerning the things in which the public is interested. We want our correspondents to present frankly and freely their views on what seems to them the most important athletic problem of the hour.

The response has surprised us. Undergraduates have sent us letters from one hundred and twenty-five colleges and universities in thirty-nine States of the Union. The task of the judges has been exceptionally difficult because of the uniform excellence of the contributions. In some of the other prize contests a halfdozen letters have stood out because of some individual quality in the writer or in his or her mode of expression. It probably is the fact that college athletics is not a subject that excites very deep or passionate feeling. Even when one has strong definite opinions about athletics one can express those feelings without heartrending emotion.

It is quite clear from these letters that, while the American undergraduate enjoys athletics and regards them as an important feature of his undergraduate

may be taken as representative of American college opinion, and we think they may, that opinion regards the athletic side of college life as subordinate to the intellectual side. Undergraduate opinion not only favors athletics as a source of recreation and pleasure, but, and beyond that, because athletics foster the college spirit, and loyalty to the college is as essential for the functioning of college life as loyalty to the country is essential to the functioning of citizenship. This view of college athletics is well brought out in the letter from a West Point cadet who wins a fourth prize.

There is apparently no sympathy for professionalism-that is to say, for the hiring of men to come to college in order that they may win games. There is apparently a good deal of feeling that there is a kind of professional attitude

to see athletics relegated to an obscure place in the collegiate scheme of things. There is in the colleges a third class who are so indifferent as to believe that the colleges are not being ruined by organized athletics. They also believe that the country and the colleges with it would suffer no irreparable injury if all the footballs in the world, and most of the football players with them, were consigned to a watery grave. This class I am proud to represent.

As the self-appointed representative of this great body of Laodiceans, I claim the honor of setting forth its platform.

The first plank is this: We want to be let alone. Almost every college that supports competitive athletics is supposed to owe its existence to some powerful force known as "college spirit." This particular brand of patriotism finds its expression almost entirely in going out for the team and rooting for the team. This kind of thing would be all right provided that it could be kept within reasonable bounds. It is an intolerable nuisance when it becomes such an obsession with the majority of undergraduates that they are expected to drop all other interests and pursuits and come out for the team if they can be at all serviceable. I have no plan to suggest which would bring about a change in this attitude toward athletics. I merely point out the fact that this overemphasis on the importance of sports is responsible for most of the evils which are laid at the door of organized sport.

In the second place, we want the newspapers muzzled as far as the publicity departments in the colleges can do it. It seems rather hard that after four years in a college, which one has learned to respect because of its traditions of scholarship and character and because of its student body, one should always go out into the world and find that its reputation rested on the records made by its teams. Most colleges seem desirous of getting a reputation of this sort, a fact which reacts on the undergraduate to make him feel that the alumni and trustees of his college are far more anxious to have him boost the stock of the college by a frequent appearance on the sporting pages of the newspapers than by scholastic accomplishment.

Finally, we are in favor of purely amateur athletics. If this means that the standing of every athlete should be investigated by a board appointed for that purpose, well and good. If it means that athletic scholarships and gifts by alumni to men who are star athletes must be abolished, let them be done away with. The whole matter should be ieft to a board appointed in every college to keep athletics clean. The members of this board should have two qualifications: they should know the difference between a professional and an amateur, and they should prefer the latter. We want this because it is not conducive to the self-respect of a member of a college to have his institution

represented by tramp athletes of a mental age averaging around thirteen.

The three points enumerated above are those which I consider most important in the regulation of college athletics. I have neither the space nor the knowledge of the subject to go into the various methods suggested for bringing to pass these desiderata. I have merely indicated what seem to me the main issues.

I am not in favor of abolishing athletics in the colleges. I like to go to a football game. I like to "take a pipe or a girl" to a baseball game when the weather is pleasant and the pop and icecream cones are circulating freely. What I do object to is having my interest in these sports taken as the most important factor in my psychology as an undergraduate, and used as a basis for building up great commercial organizations to boom the college.

JOHN W. SCOTT, JR., Princeton University, Class of 1923.

SECOND PRIZE

A LOPSIDED DEVELOPMENT OF INTERCOLLEGIATE ATHLETICS

T

WO years ago our football team made a transcontinental tour. Last year funds were raised for one of the largest stadiums in the Middle West. From where I am writing the sound of riveting hammers on the skeleton of that stadium is like the rapping of the first woodpecker. The Outlook asks what undergraduates think about it. Two pictures came to my mind as I read the announcement of the contest on intercollegiate athletics.

One day during the drive for stadium funds six students were at work in a laboratory. All but one, a girl in the freshman class, had been called upon by solicitors. The man assigned to get her subscription came to the laboratory. She told him frankly that she could not afford to give the amount set by the committee as the minimum which would be accepted from each student. He argued for half an hour, presenting the usual plea-that our present athletic field was too small; every one was doing his share; no one could show such a lack of school spirit; "years later you will come back and point with pride at this monument and say, 'I helped build that.'" The usual result followed; she signed on the dotted line. Turning to us and biting her lip to keep back the tears, she said, "I-I don't know where I can get the money."

Twenty thousand people are in the second picture, less than half of them students. Twenty-two men are spending every bit of strength and intelligence they possess for their colleges. The solid masses of humanity in the stands are yelling themselves hoarse and working themselves into a state of hysteria that any one would consider dangerous

to health and sanity if encountered anywhere but at a football game. Like a sore thumb on the body of intercollegiate athletics, football attracts attention out of proportion to its real importance.

The football fan can recite many reasons why his favorite sport deserves popular support: It maintains school spirit at fever heat; a winning football team influences young men of ability to enroll in the school; football receipts pay other athletic expenses; interest in the college among citizens of the town and State rises to high tide during the football season. These contentions may be true; but do they settle the question?

At this University school spirit measured by team support is the best in years. Lack of honor among the students caused the abandonment of an honor tradition and the establishment of a faculty committee on cheating in examinations. Wagers on the outcome of the games have been so common that the student who was not financially interested in the team's victories was popularly supposed to be missing a lot of the thrill in football. Our stadium will seat ten times the number of students in the University. Nine-tenths of

the seats will be filled by people who

see us when we are least sane. I wonder what impression they will receive of this University as an educational institution.

The expenditure for football is entirely out of proportion to the number of students who can be educated in habits of healthy recreation. Almost any other sport would serve better for that purpose. I believe our college athletics is suffering from a severe case of lopsided development simply because the public is willing to express its approval of one of our sports in dollars and cents. I wish we had the strength of character to do what is better for us, though not so popular.

"ECCENTRIC,"

Ohio State University, Class of 1922.

THIRD PRIZE KEEPING ATHLETICS IN THEIR PROPER PLACE

OST of the uproar over intercolle

Mgiate athletics sounds vain and

needless to us up here in central New York. We have managed to do without scandals or violent disputes so long that we can hardly see the reasons for having them elsewhere. Not that our system of athletic control is perfect, or the relations of Faculty, coaches, and students entirely frictionless. But we have found that an able administration of sports, a faculty maintaining high scholastic standards, and a common sense of honor will keep college athletics in their proper place. Consequently we have indulged in very little altercation or anxiety regarding them.

Is not the whole matter being taken too seriously? Students perhaps tend to over-emphasize athletics, but their el