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is set back about thirty yards from the river, separated from it by a cart-track which leads to the provincial capital, three miles distant. The stilts are a protection against flooding, although severe floods have come only once in Nhep’s lifetime, a few years back, the result of uncontrolled logging along the Mekong river, which Cambodians know as the ‘Mother of Waters’. As in all traditional Cambodian dwellings, everyone lives in one large room, occupying the whole of the first floor, which is reached by a flight of steep wooden steps leading up from the garden outside. The house where he and Sâr were born stood on the same spot, Nhep says, and was built in exactly the same way. It was destroyed in a bombing raid during the civil war.
    The family was well-off, indeed, by local standards, wealthy. Their father, Loth, owned 50 acres of rice-paddy — ten times the average, comparable to the living of a junior mandarin — and their home was one of the biggest among the twenty or so houses in the village. At transplanting and harvest time, Loth hired his poorer neighbours to provide extra labour.
    Nhep, the youngest child, was born in the summer of 1927, the Year of the Hare; Sâr, eighteen months older, in
    March 1925
    , the Year of the Ox;
    *
    and their brother, Chhay, in the Dog Year, 1922. There were three elder siblings — two boys and a girl — who had also been born within a year or two of each other, but more than a decade earlier. Three others had died young. Because they were so close in age, the three youngest were inseparable, particularly Sâr and Nhep. They played and swam in the river together, and in the evenings, by the light of a rush-lamp, listened to the old people of the village recounting stories and legends from the days before the French established the protectorate in the 1860s.
    Their grandfather, Phem, was a link with that time. The children never knew him, but Loth used to tell them of his exploits. Phem had grown up during what were afterwards called the ‘Years of Calamity’, when Vietnamese and Thai invaders vied for suzerainty over what remained of the old Khmer kingdom, and court poets voiced the nation’s fears that soon ‘Cambodia would no longer exist’. The Royal Palace at Oudong was razed and Phnom Penh was destroyed. Among the populace, those who escaped the corvées imposed by the rival armies ‘fled to the forest to live on leaves and roots’. The Vietnamese were in the habit of gouging out their captives’ eyes, salting their wounds and burying them alive. A
    French missionary
    who witnessed the devastation left by the Thais reported that they were little better:
    The Siamese method of warfare is to steal everything they can lay hands on; to burn and destroy wherever they pass; to enslave those men that they do not kill, and to carry off the women and children. They show no humanity towards their captives. If they cannot keep up with the march, they are beaten, maltreated or killed. Unmoved by tears and wailing, they slaughter small children in front of their mothers. They have no more scruple in killing a person than a fly, perhaps less, for their religion forbids them to kill animals.
    Eventually a compromise was reached between the Thai court and the Vietnamese Emperor at Hue, peace was restored and Phem prospered. He became a notable — ‘Elder Phem’, the villagers called him — and, during the great rebellion against the French in 1885-6, he organised food supplies for loyalist troops, fighting to preserve the prerogatives of the monarchy against the inroads of colonial rule. But one day, Loth told the children, Phem and two friends walked into an ambush in a village on the other side of the river and were killed.
    From that time on, the family received the favour of the provincial governor, a staunch royalist named Dekchoa Y, which gave them a place in the patronage network percolating down from the Throne. Loth’s sister, Cheng, obtained a post in the