Inside the stone walls of these Buddhist temples there is always a sudden peace that completely shuts out the noise and bustle of the city. The main temples, surrounded by many subsidiary shrines and altars to particular aspects of the Buddha, are set in the middle of huge stone-flagged courtyards of mellowed grey, white and pink stones, and down the sides are rows and rows of gay, sweet-smelling flowering shrubs of reds and oranges and yellows. Not only is it still and beautiful and shaded by trees, it is perfectly clean and truly beautiful. Sometimes you see Thais praying on the ground before some favourite altar, calling out as they kneel in a loud chanting voice; sometimes you see a woman making a humble offering of heavysmelling flowers; but on the whole, generally, little seems to go on to spoil the enchantment of the place.

By the gates stand giant statues in Chinese style of weird and awful personages. Little wooden temples like dolls’ houses stand built into trees growing out of stone rockeries in the courtyards, the rockery plants themselves shadowed by the fantastic lichened roots of the trees that seem to bind them to the ground. The glazed tiles of the pagoda-shaped roofs are of green, rusty and ruddy brown colour, and are imported all the way from China. The Lotus shrines and carvings, the countless gold-washed figures of the sitting Buddha, the elaborate stone trellis-work studded with coloured glass and pieces of broken pottery in bright colours, somehow just fit into the whole scheme and make it lovely. Considered separately they might be bizarre, or even tawdry. There is also a pool where they used to keep sacred, very old crocodiles, a pool now empty. Above it was a little stone room and balcony where the children of the old kings of Thailand had played together.

Talking enthusiastically to the Dane, the priest then led us to see the Reclining Buddha. In a vast gloomy, shuttered temple he lies, a reclining figure, his golden head propped on tapering fingered hand. He is 46 metres long, and in outsiders’ eyes, perhaps only remarkable for that vastness of size. He is not beautiful, and when we saw him there was a great bamboo scaffolding reaching the roof round about his head where workmen were re-guilding the hat and curls of the immense image. The only beautiful thing I noted were the delicate and exquisite little pictures in mother-of-pearl on the flat soles of the Buddha’s terrific feet.