Kbal Spean

This guide to Kbal Spean in Siem Reap starts at a carving in the riverbed where a reclining Vishnu and his wife Lakshmi were cut from the sandstone sometime in the eleven hundreds, and at the scar left when looters sawed at their faces one night decades ago. It follows the guard who refused to discuss what happened, and doubles back to 1969, when a hermit led French ethnologist Jean Boulbet to rediscover the site, its thousand small lingas, and reliefs of Shiva, Uma and Brahma carved along the same stretch of river. Follow the current downstream and it drops toward a waterfall, the water Khmer belief once carried down to Angkor.