The bellies of the
clouds sagged low and heavy with water, and a steady rain fell on Hannah, Jeb
and I as we dragged our tired feet up the wet road to the top of Phnom Sampeau,
a hill in central Cambodia. Rivulets of water ran down the mountain, trying
weakly to wash us back down from the muddy road where we’d begun the climb. The
little light that the sun offered at that early hour was swallowed up by the
thickness of the clouds, leaving us in a dark twilight.
Informational signage
was non-existent along the way, but coming upon an offshoot of the road, we
decided to see where it would take us. Eventually, a temple rose out of the
damp, dreary forest. At first there didn’t seem to be anyone around, but then
we spotted a young monk, clad in a deep maroon robe, with a smoldering
cigarette hanging off his lower lip. He was sweeping the porch of a small
building, and glanced up at us through the rain.
“Killing Caves?” we
asked shyly, not knowing if our presence at the temple was intrusive. He gave a
curt nod and pointed to his right, then lowered his head and continued with his
work. We uncertainly began to walk in the direction in which he had gestured,
and came to a narrow path. Is this the way? we kept asking ourselves, looking around and
trying to find some remnants of a sign indicating that we had indeed arrived at
the Killing Caves.
I was looking about,
surveying the drenched greenery around me, when I heard a grunting sound behind
me. I turned to see another monk who had come forward to reaffirm that we were
heading in the right direction. He, too, was adorned in that a maroon robe, but
was older than the first monk we’d seen. At first I could barely make out his
features, but as my eyes focused in the dim light, I could see that his face
was disfigured: his black beady eyes were dwarfed by his bulbous nose that
spread wide across his cheeks, rippling and protruding like a small mountain
range down his long face. His ears were small but inflated with small balloons
of flesh.
He grunted again,
gesturing for us to continue down the narrow path. I turned, not wanting to
stare at his deformities for fear of offending him, and followed behind Hannah
and Jeb as we continued. Soon we came upon a slippery flight of metal stairs,
leading down into the Killing Caves themselves. The black walls of the cave
loomed eerily over us, soaking up the little light that made it through the
dark clouds. We could barely see as we slowly descended into the cave and
landed on a white tiled floor. The cave swallowed up all sound, except for a
strong, steady drip, drip, drip
of lone drops of water, falling into a metal funnel from the roof of the cave
high above. Like a drumming metronome, the drips seemed to be meting out
eternity for the bones that call the cave home.
The Killing Caves earn
their name from their horrific past. The Khmer Rouge, who brutally ruled
Cambodia from 1975 to 1979, liberally murdered innocent people in fear that
someone, somewhere, was trying to oust their regime. In less than four years,
about 2 million people—roughly a quarter of Cambodia’s population at the
time—died due to starvation, disease, and exhaustion at forced labor camps, and
by torture and murder at the hands of the government. The Killing Caves,
located just outside Battambang, Cambodia, are one of many sites where innocent
people were brought to die after they had been tortured into false confessions.
Thousands of men, women, and children were bludgeoned to death, and their
bodies were tossed down into the cave, creating a mass grave.
Inside the cave was so
dim that I wouldn’t have known what was encased in the large, glass-enclosed
shrine, save for the research I’d done beforehand. Piled in the temple-like
glass house were the countless bones and skulls of some of the Cambodians that
had been brutally murdered above, and carelessly dumped below. Although I couldn’t
see the contents of that shrine, the knowledge of what rested before my eyes
was more than enough to have a tremendous impact upon my psyche. Emotion rushed
through me as I tried to comprehend the terror of the atrocities committed a
few short decades ago upon that very ground. I thought about the victims and
their families, and the killers and their families too. What would it have been
like, to be on either end of the jagged edges of the sugar palm leaves
sometimes used to slit throats? My mind was trying to comprehend the
incomprehensible. Unable to speak or make comment, I stood in silence,
listening to the loud, metallic drip of falling water.
