We carried on with the excursion, while my father drew the paths on his new map, starting from the point our tents were. From what I could see there was a lot of work to do, a lot of walking. It wasn’t a big island, since that morning from our camp we noticed that we could clearly see where the borders of the land started. But it was all new, and we needed to be careful.

As we went ahead we came to a stop when we heard something.

“Do you hear that?” my dad uttered. It was the sound of water. A fall, maybe. We hurried up and followed the sound. What we saw was something huge. In front of us, stood out what it looked like a temple. From what I learnt by reading my new books, it was a Khmer temple, not so different than those famous Buddhist temples I saw in the photographs, only smaller. The sound of water came from three falls that embraced the whole structure, which had been built on a steep hill.

“Wonderful” I heard myself say, bringing my hands on my mouth. “That’s simply wonderful”

“This thing must have been there for who knows how many years!” Aaron uttered.

“Thousand years, you might say!” my father asserted.

“These temples have been built eight hundred years before the Current Era”, I explained. I was so overwhelmed. I couldn’t believe we were seeing something that no one ever saw. The show that was performing before our eyes was only ours, we were the first and only audience ever. And I could see it by the way the bricks still had their original forms, no sign of human touch. Everything was as it had been left. And that was amazing. I took some steps closer, without approaching too much, as I felt like an intruder, to take it all in. Decorations were all over the bricks, carved into pieced of stucco applied to the walls. The doors frames were constructed entirely from Sandstone. That beauty totally swept me away.

“Wait!” I was too captured by the spectacle that I didn’t notice Henry approaching the entrance of the temple. My dad stopped him immediately. “Wait, you can’t. You don’t know what kind of traps you may trigger if you touch that door. Khmer civilization surely knew how to protect their treasures”