Theme

On a gallery pillar at Ta Prohm there is a small, weathered animal relief with a row of bumps along its back. Guides call it a stegosaurus. It is a damaged carving in a 12th-century Buddhist monastery, not a portrait of a living dinosaur and not evidence that the Khmers knew paleontology. The rest of Ta Prohm — the trees, the Tomb Raider courtyard, the inscription of 1186 — is the reason the temple matters. The relief is a thirty-second stop on the way through.

1 temple in view