The Cambodian roads, however, could be just as risky as the rails. National Routes 3 and 4, which run from Phnom Penh to Kampot Province, were famous as hunting grounds for government soldiers who liked to use their numerous "security checkpoints" to shake down motorists. The bodies of three young Westerners abducted on Route 4 had been recovered just one week before Braquet, Slater, and Wilson decided to set out for Kampot.

When it came to traveling in Cambodia, nobody could say what move would look stupid tomorrow. "You don't want to get into the game of second-guessing travel decisions in this country," one local journalist told me. "The road's a mess, so these three guys took the train. It was a tactical decision. Lots of people took the train before them. It's a nice ride--if you live to tell about it."

The train that Braquet, Slater, and Wilson boarded at the Phnom Penh station around dawn on July 26 of last year was a typically ominous example of Cambodian rolling stock--armor-plated and pocked with rusty gouges left by bullets and shrapnel. Two flatbed cars, fronted with a crude steel plow, were pushed ahead of the locomotive to absorb the explosion in the event that the track should be mined. Machine-gun nests were installed on the roof, where the trio perched for the view. A dozen or more members of the Royal Cambodian Armed Forces, toting AK-47s, mingled with the passengers above and below.

Part of the pleasure of adventure, of course, is defying timidity, and Braquet, Slater, and Wilson were not put off by the train's battle-ready appearance. Still, none of the three could call himself an old Cambodia hand. David Wilson had been in the country the longest--almost a month. He had been up to the ruins of Angkor, the complex of temples dating from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries that marks the apex of Khmer civilization. Back in Melbourne, Wilson had been a social worker and coached a poor children's soccer team. He'd sent word home that he was loving his trip, that he was charged with the excitement of a nation in flux.

Mark Slater was a veteran globe-trotter, a son of the British working class who'd been on the road for much of his adult life, returning home from stints in Thailand, Egypt, Israel, and South Africa just long enough to save up for the next journey. In May, he had quit his job in a plastics factory in Corby, Northamptonshire, and embarked on a one-year tour of India. Then, on July 9, he called home to say that he was off to Cambodia, even though he was suffering from dysentery. He had arrived in Phnom Penh only a few days before meeting up with Braquet and Wilson.

Braquet, a native of Nice, had also just arrived in Cambodia. He had previously been on a Himalayan trek through Nepal, where he, too, had been stricken with dysentery. Braquet was on the mend, but he felt depleted, and he was eager for a holiday on the coast.

By all accounts, the three were having a grand ride as the train worked its way south. They kicked back on the roof, passed a few joints, and watched the rainy-season landscape slide by--hours of rice paddies picketed with towering sugar palms.

Then the flat land began to lift on either side of the track, narrowing to a valley near Kampong Trach, where all the past ambushes on the train had occurred. It was here that the local passengers began to pray.

When they are not at the capitol hotel, backpackers can usually be found around Phnom Penh at haunts like the Café No Problem or the Heart of Darkness bar, comparing stomach parasites or trading battered paperbacks of On the Road or Dispatches or the Bhagavad Gita. Measuring their itineraries in neither days nor weeks, but months and sometimes years, these slightly wide-eyed young Westerners are heirs to the nineteenth-century tradition of the "grand tour," venturing out to see the world before they return home to more settled existences.

But the grand tour was a privilege of the moneyed classes, whose members traveled about Europe with a steamer trunk full of evening clothes, letters of introduction to proper society homes, and quite likely a maiden aunt or some other suitable chaperon in tow. Now the steamer trunk has given way to the backpack and the money belt and perhaps a shoulder bag of some colorful tribal weave. The evening suits have been replaced by jeans and a few T-shirts, hiking boots and sandals, and after a little time on the road a pair of lightweight drawstring harem pants. Rather than the letters of introduction and the maiden aunt, there is the Lonely Planet guidebook series, which describes its "basic travel philosophy" as "Don't worry about whether your trip will work out. Just go!" And the backpackers go--not to the much-trodden pathways of old Europe, but to the troubled reaches of the Third World, to see how far a very tight budget and local ground transportation will carry them off the beaten track.

Of course, the backpackers have beaten a track of their own, known in Asia as the banana pancake circuit, after the cheap sustenance served at the guest houses that cater to the scene from Bali to Brunei, Bangkok to Bangalore--and back again, any which way you want to zig it or zag it. Lonely Planet's South-East Asia on a Shoestring has sold more than half a million copies, and with a glance at its "Where to Stay" pages, backpackers can pull into any guest house on the circuit and find kindred spirits with whom to swap tales of the road and maybe share that $3 bed for the night.

The first Lonely Planet guidebook to Cambodia had been published only in September 1992. You could still be among the first to "rediscover" the place while the smoke of war slowly lifted. From 1991 to 1993, the country had been run by a massive United Nations peacekeeping force. By the time the blue helmets left, there was a new, independent government in place, and foreigners were theoretically free to travel about the country.

But Cambodia's peace was a peace in name only. The Khmer Rouge, which had presided over four years of slaughter in which one million of the country's eight million people died, had been driven from Phnom Penh by the Vietnamese communists in 1979. Still, the rebels continued to wage a destabilizing guerrilla war from jungle camps along the Thailand border and in various "unpacified" pockets like the Elephant Mountains in Kampot. Pol Pot, the Maoist clique's architect of genocide, remained alive and in charge, and he had refused to participate in the UN-sponsored elections. The civil war continued in a series of offensives and counteroffensives that kept the country on edge. And there were still more land mines in the ground than people walking over it--an estimated 8.5 million mines. It was not a place where you wanted to go off the beaten track, not even one step.

Moreover, the Khmer Rouge had made kidnapping a full-scale enterprise, a key source of manual labor and income. Each year thousands of Cambodian villagers are taken by the insurgents and ransomed for as much as $40,000 and as little as a bag of rice or a chicken. And now that the country has opened to the outside world, tourists and expatriate workers are regularly pulled into Cambodia's culture of menace. In March of last year, Melissa Himes, an American aid worker from North Carolina, was captured and held for 42 days by the Khmer Rouge in the first of a series of Western hostage-takings. "It was mind-numbing," Himes told me when I visited her in Bangkok, where she had resettled. "Rice twice a day, maybe some soup from tree leaves and snails. At first they wanted things like Rado brand Swiss watches, TVs, Volvos--ridiculous stuff. They'd say, 'If you don't pay the ransom, we'll send you to the highest authority.' I thought, 'Oh, like Pol Pot,' but then I realized that they meant going up the mountain and getting shot." After prolonged negotiations conducted over a purloined UN field radio, Himes was ransomed for a few tons of rice, some dried fish, and building supplies and returned safely to Phnom Penh.

Even before her release, two Britons and an Australian, all in their midtwenties, were abducted from a taxi as they traveled from Phnom Penh to Sihanoukville. Whether they were taken by the Khmer Rouge or bandits has never been established, but it was their remains that were recovered from the jungle just before Braquet, Slater, and Wilson set off by train for Kampot.

No place in the world is entirely safe; riding the New York subway or living on a California earthquake fault can certainly be as dangerous as traveling in Cambodia. But Westerners in the tropics have always had mythomaniacal tendencies. In those baked, chaotic places, the rules of home don't seem to apply, and just being there can seem like a dramatic act. While the colonial flags have been torn down, colonial mentalities still linger, shadowing the movements of Westerners in the Third World. Even among those whose devoutest wish is to go native, one finds a curious and often treacherous sense of immunity, which allows foreign adventurers to feel simultaneously released and protected while flirting with other people's hardships.

One can only imagine the terror and confusion that Braquet, Slater, and Wilson felt when explosions shook their train in the early afternoon of July 26. Some 40 Khmer Rouge fighters stormed down from the hills, machine guns blazing. In the brief battle that followed, 11 passengers and two of the train's security detail were killed before the guards gave up and sought only to protect themselves.

The guerrillas boarded the train, sweeping through the cars, taking whatever they could lay their hands on: motorbikes, rice, jewelry, cash, cigarettes, chickens, pigs--everything but the clothes on the passengers' backs. They loaded their booty onto bullock carts and then built a campfire and cooked themselves dinner from their spoils. After releasing most of the passengers, they marched off into the jungle with some 20 hostages--including the three backpackers--and headed for their base at Phnom Vour, a fortress of steep limestone escarpments ringed with minefields. This was the same place where, three months earlier, the Khmer Rouge had held Melissa Himes.

Em Op, the train's chief engineer, later said, "It was an average attack." A woman who had been riding the train and was briefly detained by the Khmer Rouge told Cambodia's English fortnightly, the Phnom Penh Post, "I saw the foreigners lying...in a small cottage. They were crying. They were shackled at night." She also said that a Khmer Rouge soldier told her, "I will send [the Western hostages'] bones to the authorities by the year 2000."

When I arrived in Phnom Penh in the scorching dry season last February, there were daily reports of major battles between government and Khmer Rouge forces 200 miles away, yet the menace felt oddly remote. Strolling along the embankment over the Tonle Sap River at dusk, I watched fishermen in their sampans throw nets in spinning halos. Families gathered at the pavilion across from the royal palace, posing in their favorite outfits for strolling photographers. A sweet breeze carried over the water from the bushes on the far bank. Vendors sold pungent flower garlands, water lily seeds, and gaudy inflatable animals--ducks, elephants, bunnies. Monks in pumpkin-colored robes bathed their feet at the water's edge, and children swung cages full of swallows, which you could buy and release to acquire good karma--only to watch the children chase the birds down to be traded again.

Yes, the country is unspeakably poor, maimed, stunted by corruption and hunger. But there is great spirit in the streets--even laughter. Phnom Penh, radically depopulated during the Zero Years, as Pol Pot dubbed his reign of terror, is now a bustling city. Travelers barter in the markets and wander along the boulevards, sightseeing at the fantastically ornate Silver Pagoda or the National Museum, whose roof is home to thousands of bats.

Against these backdrops, it is the young, tall Westerners in their bright and slightly tattered costumes who appear exotic--as if they had stepped in from the jungle. One morning in Phnom Penh, I met up with Danny Allen, the young Briton who had come to Cambodia on the recommendation of his thrill-seeking friend in Sydney. Danny was having breakfast with Guido Marx, a 23-year-old industrial apprentice from Hamburg, and we decided to drive together to the old Khmer Rouge killing fields at Choeung Ek, on the outskirts of Phnom Penh, where the remains of about 9,000 people were found after the Pol Pot genocide.

The road ran through parched rice paddies; a severe drought had blighted more than one-third of Cambodia's rice harvest. Staring out the window at the desiccated land, Guido said: "It's clear why you don't see fat people here."

Guido, who had been traveling for 16 months--in India, Nepal, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand--was tall and very skinny, but he said that he had been a fat person himself not long ago. Then he got sick in India and lost 40 pounds. I was reminded of Jean-Michel Braquet and Mark Slater, both of whom had come to Cambodia suffering from dysentery; it seemed these young men were taking a lot of punishment for the sake of adventure, and I wondered whether Guido thought it had been worth it.

"I'm getting used to it now," he said.

It was a phrase I'd heard over and over again from the backpackers. What was it about this notion--getting used to things? It was as if Cambodia served Western visitors as a sort of Outward Bound program: You stare into the abyss and get your perspective adjusted.

But then Guido said, "I never want anyone pointing a gun at me." He laughed. "You can always go home and tell people you heard gunfire without going to hear it."

Danny shrugged. "I hear the Khmer Rouge are mostly after Americans now," he said. "So I've got a big Union Jack in my backpack. I'll wave that at them if I get in a pinch."

The thousands of skulls shelved in the memorial stupa at Choeung Ek suggested that the Union Jack might not do the trick. As a commemoration of a national catastrophe, it was very poorly maintained. Our driver, who had told me that "only" his brother and his father had been killed during the Pol Pot years, did not seem to relate his losses to the monument. Parked beneath a banyan tree, he cranked country music from his car stereo and wiped the dust from his headlights with a rag. Perhaps, in a country with so much horrific memory, the greater challenge of survival is to practice forgetting.

The exhibits at Choeung Ek were, in fact, weathering into oblivion. The few explanatory labels had faded or peeled away. The wooden markers that once identified the mass graves had been scavenged for fuel. All that remained were the tower of skulls and the open pits. The skulls were beautiful and strangely intact--no sign of the bludgeoning that the Khmer Rouge is said to have favored to save bullets. They were arranged in tidy rows with little plastic labels, as if in a natural history museum: JUVENILE FEMALE KAMPUCHEAN FROM 15 TO 20 YEARS OLD. MATURE MALE KAMPUCHEAN FROM 40 TO 60 YEARS OLD.

Set apart from the others were several skulls behind the label EUROPEAN.

On August 3, eight days after the hostages were taken from the Kampot train, the Khmer Rouge released photographs of the three backpackers, standing barefoot and bedraggled in the rain at the Phnom Vour camp. The photographs and an accompanying audiotape were delivered to Cambodian government officials through a network of intermediaries, which is how the negotiations would be conducted. It was, at best, a shaky chain of communication, in which nobody seemed certain who was speaking to whom.

The hostages said that they were fine and that they were being forced to work. At one point, Mark Slater made a statement that was understood to be an addition to the Khmer Rouge script. He said, "Don't listen to the government, just do what you feel." But nobody was sure what he meant--whether he was addressing his family or the Western diplomats and Cambodian government officials who were handling the ransom negotiations.

The first ransom prices bandied about ranged from $50,000 to $150,000 a head--in gold. However, the Australian, British, and French embassies each had a no-ransom policy, arguing that any payment would set a precedent, making every other Westerner in Cambodia a potential Khmer Rouge cash source. And reports of ransom-raising efforts by private groups--David Wilson's teammates at the Edithvale-Aspendale Football Club in Melbourne, for instance--invariably came to naught.

The situation appeared to be spiraling out of control. A number of freelance intermediaries, ranging from Australian mercenaries to assorted Cambodian government officials, sought to get in on the action. As reporters flocked to Kampot Province, they sent back more and more baroque stories of new hopes and new disappointments, until finally the government kicked all journalists out of the area. The international attention, said the authorities, was only encouraging the Khmer Rouge to advance ever wilder demands.

What had begun as an ugly but relatively straightforward kidnapping for profit had turned political. On August 16, the Khmer Rouge's clandestine radio station upped the ante, promising to release the hostages if Australia, Britain, and France, three of Cambodia's key financial supporters, would cut off all further assistance to the royal government. The announcement provoked a panicked reaction from Phnom Penh. Despite government promises to the contrary, the Royal Cambodian Armed Forces moved on Phnom Vour in the second week of August, deploying heavy artillery and thousands of troops around the rebel base.

In the midst of the shelling, a reporter from London's Sunday Times managed to arrange a radio conversation with the hostages. "It is as if they are bombing to kill us," Mark Slater said in that August 19 interview. "We hear...heavy machine-gun fire, mortars...rockets. We jump in the trenches and we are so, so scared."

Slater's voice was heavy with despair; his dysentery had come back with a vengeance. "I am very weak," the former factory hand said. "We get up at five, have something to eat at ten--rice, pumpkin. We lie about...until nighttime. At about seven or eight o'clock we get shackled up. When the bombs start going off, we have to hop as best we can to the trenches. When the sun goes down, that's it. We have no light."

Braquet got on the line and said, "Our hope is just falling every day. It is a very difficult situation to handle even if you are a strong person." Braquet had contracted malaria at Phnom Vour, and he was also suffering from an infected leg wound received when he stepped on a sharpened bamboo stake--a booby trap. "We are going to die here," he said. "I am too young to die. I am an innocent person."

Wilson, too, was feverish. "Our spirits are getting worse by the day, to be very honest," he said.

"I love [my family] very dearly," Slater said, "and unless the bombing stops, we have no chance of living. There is no way for us to leave if the ransom is not met. Every bomb we hear is like a nail in the coffin. We are already inside the coffin, since we were told we were going to be executed a week or two ago."

After this conversation was published, the British hostage's father, Jack Slater, wrote to the Braquet and Wilson families. "Nobody bar us knows how it feels at this moment," he observed. "They are all our sons now."

The foreign correspondents club in Phnom Penh, a lofty space with an open balustrade facing out over the confluence of the Tonle Sap and Mekong Rivers, is a favorite hangout for journalists, foreign aid workers, embassy staffers, businessmen, and the ordnance specialists who work as de-miners in Cambodia. It's a place of would-be Marlowes, swapping tales and seeking to explain their world to themselves.

I found the expatriates at the FCC reluctant to revisit the harrowing months of the hostage crisis. The ordeal had undermined their sense of ease in their adopted home and shattered what optimism they might have had about the country's prospects for reconstruction. Many people said they had not ventured outside Phnom Penh for the better part of a year.

One night at the FCC, as scores of lizards skittered over the yellow stucco walls to the beat of Van Morrison, I sat with Nate Thayer, the Cambodia correspondent for Far Eastern Economic Review. A native New Englander, Thayer is widely regarded as one of the most knowledgeable observers of Cambodian affairs. He has a shiny, shaved scalp, a close-cropped beard, and narrow blue eyes. There is an air of carefully cultivated mystery about him; his mobile telephone is stamped with the WORDS BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU SAY ON THIS PHONE. Throughout our conversation he spat Copenhagen snuff juice into an Orange Crush can.

Recently, Thayer told me, he had returned from a quasi-scientific expedition into the Cambodian hinterlands in search of the kouprey, an obscure Southeast Asian bovine that has been listed as extinct for the past half-century. Sponsored by the Cambodian government, the expedition forged into the jungle with a small herd of elephants, several montagnard trackers, and an arsenal of automatic weaponry. Having heard that tigers attack humans only from the rear, the men wore masks on the backs of their heads, masks bearing the visages of Donald Duck, Margaret Thatcher, and Warren Christopher. In the end, the wildest creatures they encountered were a few Khmer Rouge guerrillas, who fled at the sight of them. The team fled, too, heat-sick and elephant-sore. The kouprey remains at large, and the expedition's only contribution to science seems to have been its affirmation of the expatriate faith that bad trips still sometimes make good stories.

Thayer's take on "the hostage thing," as the serial kidnappings of Westerners had come to be called, was that anyone who had ever imagined that tourists were immune to the violence and predation of Cambodia had simply been deluding himself. On the other hand, he didn't seem to feel that the security situation was any worse than it had been at other times in the recent past. In fact, it was partly the element of risk that Thayer seemed to like about Cambodia. "A lot of what attracts people to this place," he said, "is that you control your own perimeter. Guys like us are looking for collapsed cultures, places where you can take your own chances. I've been hospitalized for malaria 16 times. I was taken hostage by the Khmer Rouge twice, captured ten times by Thai intelligence and Cambodian government troops. I've had three assassination attempts. I've had eight of my personal security guards killed. That's how it is here. Soldiers at checkpoints like to put unexploded ordnance across the road so you've really got to stop, and often they do this just because they want a cigarette."

Thayer spat another stream of tobacco juice into his can. "It's kind of a discombobulated system," he said. "But you get used to it."

At the end of August, a videotape of Braquet, Slater, and Wilson made its way through the government lines at Phnom Vour and back to Phnom Penh. The three hostages, skinny and exhausted, showed the bomb shelters they had dug. "The bombing is day in and day out," said Wilson.

Braquet added, "It's just killing peasants."

It later emerged that by this time Pol Pot was interested in using the three hostages not for financial gain, but rather as political pawns in the showdown between the government and the Khmer Rouge. The three were "getting thinner and thinner from day to day," a captured Khmer Rouge soldier told the Phnom Penh Post "I don't know why they eat so little. Perhaps they have gotten homesick, or they don't like the food."

As the Cambodian army increased the intensity of its attack, a new tape recording of Mark Slater circulated in Phnom Penh. "If the governments won't pay for our release," he begged, "please do the moral thing and give our families the opportunity to arrange our release."

The hopelessness of Slater's pleas still haunts his father. "We couldn't have paid the ransom ourselves," Jack Slater says. "But if anything could have been done, we would have done it. We'd have sold the house. And yet this wasn't like some Hollywood movie, where you leave the money in a kiosk somewhere. It's the jungle. And these people are pathological killers."

On October 16, Khmer Rouge Colonel Chhouk Rin, the second in command at Phnom Vour, defected to the government army with some 150 of his men. Chhouk Rin was the man who had masterminded the raid on the train, but he had had a bitter falling out with the Phnom Vour chieftain, Noun Paet. For his defection, the government paid Chhouk Rin an award of a few hundred dollars and his wife was given a free trip to the hairdresser for a perm. He now holds the rank of colonel in the Royal Cambodian Armed Forces--a turn of events that has drawn protests from Western diplomats, but to no avail.

Once on the government's side, Rin assisted in the assault on Phnom Vour, and by the end of October Noun Paet and his remaining troops were forced to retreat from the mountain, taking with them some $30,000 to $40,000 that Paet had finagled in one of many aborted ransom schemes.

Then, on October 30, the news trickled back to Phnom Penh that the bodies of Braquet, Slater, and Wilson had been found in a shallow grave not far from the Phnom Vour Base. Intelligence reports suggest that they were murdered sometime between the eighth and the 28th of September.

When I visited the military hospital in Phnom Penh--a hellish, filthy place of 500 beds and 700 patients crammed in hallways swarming with flies--I met Lieutenant Soth Hing, who had been stationed at the captured Phnom Vour base until he stepped on a land mine and lost his right leg. The lieutenant said he was one of the men who discovered the graves of the backpackers. He had followed some truck tracks leading from Noun Paet's house to a small hill nearby, where he recognized an unwholesome smell. "The French guy," he said, "was tied with his arms behind his back, and the back of his neck was chopped in. The two others had been shot." Soth Hing rubbed the stump of his leg. "I think it was very hard for them--so far from home, not accustomed to living in the jungle like a Cambodian."

Soon after the remains were recovered, the Khmer Rouge claimed that the three had been killed because they were spies. "They were acting on behalf of the communist You'en [Vietnamese] to kill the Cambodian People," Khmer Rouge radio chided insanely. "They were war criminals." But the former Khmer Rouge commander turned Royal Armed Forces colonel, Chhouk Rin, told the Phnom Penh Post, "What they were killed for, I don't know.... It brought no advantage."

One of the great unanswered questions of the whole ordeal remains: Did the three Western embassies do all they could to save their citizens? When I posed this question to Tony Kevin, the Australian ambassador in Phnom Penh, he said, "My answer is always, 'What would you have done differently?' "

It is an answer that offers no consolation whatever to the families of Braquet, Slater, and Wilson. "We always hoped that Mark would come home and tell his own story," Jack Slater said after his son's coffin was returned to England. "We prayed that he would decide not to go to some of the places he went to. But we could never have stopped him. He was a man, not a teenager."

When Dr. Paul Knapman, a British coroner, reported on his autopsy of Mark Slater late last year, he said that it would be a pity if the hostage's "harrowing story" were to "dampen the intrepid spirit of young people who so often travel abroad these days."

The coroner had no need to worry: 1994 was a boom year for tourism in Cambodia, with visits up 50 percent from 1993, despite the hostage crises that filled the local newspapers from April through the end of the year.

The flow of ink had stopped only for a few weeks in January of this year when Susan Hadden, a college professor from Texas, was gunned down with her guide in their minivan while touring the outlying temples of Angkor near the provincial capital of Siem Reap. The government tried to play down the attack--which involved not only AK-47s, but also B-40 rockets--as a case of apolitical banditry. The Khmer Rouge, however, claimed responsibility for the killing, and Khmer Rouge Radio seized the moment to announce that hunting "long noses," as Westerners are sometimes called, was now official strategy. It would pay a bounty of $8,000--an astounding sum in Cambodia--for each kill.

When I visited Siem Reap, it was surrounded on all sides by active battlefields, but the town had a pleasantly sleepy air, with oxcarts piled high with thatch and naked schoolboys splashing in the narrow river at the city center. To the north of Siem Reap, the tilled land gives way to forests of towering gum trees, zinging with cicadas. Suddenly the road forks, and there is the great mottled magnificence of Angkor Wat.

A century ago, an eccentric Scottish doctor-adventurer named John MacGregor worked his way overland from Bangkok to Saigon and wrote up his travels in a high-spirited and pointedly irreverent volume, Through the Buffer State. Visiting the temples of Angkor, MacGregor, like everyone before and since, waxed euphoric at the grandeur and beauty, the intricacy and imponderable scope of the monuments, which loom over an area of several hundred square miles. And MacGregor raised the inevitable question--one that flummoxes those who ponder the Pyramids and the ruins of ancient Greece and Mesoamerica, as well: What happened? What went wrong? Why is all the glory here in the past?

To solve the riddle, MacGregor proposed an antithesis to the Darwinian notion of human evolution--"the theory of de-volution," he called it, or simply, "the MacGregor theory." To wit: "It must always be remembered that progress, in whatever sphere, is the result of an effort, while degeneracy is but the result of mere negation."

The man was plainly a crank, but he was onto something that must puzzle us all as we find the planet steadily diminished and as we travel to extraordinary lengths, even at some peril, to ogle what was built a millennium ago, when people were supposedly so much less advanced than we. Nobody knows exactly how the ancient Khmer kings managed to erect this staggering complex of temples or why so much energy and artisanship came together so feverishly in this spot, only be to wiped out by Thai invaders almost overnight.

That is part of the wonder of Angkor, and so, too, is the exquisite mixture of preservation and decay: the softened edges of the weathered limestone, the endless carved reliefs, the sinuous roots of the giant spong trees, and the spires of the Bayon temple, each with four mammoth faces gazing serenely off toward the diverse points of the compass. The complex seems less a work of men than a freak of nature, as organic to its spot as a mountain range thrown up in a seismic spasm.

Here and there amid the ruins, I ran into backpackers, alone or in small groups, carrying their Lonely Planet guides, their water bottles, their cameras. I was always astonished at how young most of them looked--younger, it seemed, than their twenty- or thirtysomething years. Even the faces of the little Khmer children who chased after them with ice buckets of soda and beer--"Cold drink, mistah? You buy cold drink now, OK?"--appeared more careworn, pinched into masks of adulthood.

The unguarded awe of the backpackers reminded me that this was where David Wilson had spent his last days of freedom, although Jean-Michel Braquet and Mark Slater had never made it here. I wondered what it was that had drawn them to Cambodia in the first place. What were they looking for?

Angkor seemed an eloquent answer: As the jungle twitched close and parrots jeered in the canopy, each gust of wind and each passing cloud subtly shifted the light, revealing the temples in some new aspect. Here was a world bursting with the forces of creation, and, at the same time, a graveyard.

Perhaps to claim this world, one had to risk being claimed by it.