Scientists Finally Uncovered What Angkor Wat Was Built To Hide But Refuse To Excavate It

Almost every temple at Angkor opens east, toward the sunrise. The largest of them all, Angkor Wat, turns its back on it and faces west instead, toward the setting sun, the direction the Khmer tied to death and to the god Vishnu. Some scholars shrug at it. Others think it is the whole clue, that this was never only a house of worship but a tomb dressed as a heaven, raised by a twelfth-century king, Suryavarman the Second, to hold his own ashes at the center of the universe he had built. In nineteen thirty-four a French conservator sank a shaft into the temple's holiest point and followed it twenty-three meters down, through packed sand and stone, until it turned to water. Robbers had beaten him to it. The part I find oddly moving is that after all that digging, the heart of the greatest temple on Earth held almost nothing, two thin leaves of gold and some broken crystal. Then lasers fired from a helicopter found stranger things still, demolished towers buried under the causeway, a temple that had quietly swallowed an older one. Stay for the reason this monument, alone among the world's dead wonders, was never truly lost.
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