Description

Harry Hervey's lush account takes us on a quest for a lost Khmer temple in 1925 French Indochina. Three stories march side-by-side to the measure of his cadenced prose: the impact of French colonialism on the Far East; the tale of the glorious Khmer civilization; and the sensual, barbaric lives of the region's people in another era. Renowned travel writer Pico Iyer opens with a provocative foreword, then we join Hervey on his trek, now lavishly illustrated with 140 vintage Indochina images by the author and from historian Joel Montague. This expanded edition features an extensive author profile: Harry Hervey: The Charmer Behind the Cobra, by biographer Harlan Greene; a bibliography; anthropologist Margaret Mead's 1928 review; and Hervey's gruesome essay inspired by his Indochina voyage, The Lover of Madame Guillotine. *** "King Cobra imparts all the tremendous excitement of coming upon a hidden treasure in the jungles of Indochina. Once I began to surrender to Hervey's spell, I started-as, perhaps, he did-to lose all sense of where fact ended and fiction began." PICO IYER "Hervey sees the jungle one moment as a vindictive monster, the next as an annihilating river beneath which a whole civilization drowns." MARGARET MEAD-1928 "A gripping biography of that tawny courtesan Indochina-from her early amour with a race from India, to her present liaison with France...." BOOK JACKET-1927