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www.iht.com Jane Perlez Hidden among stands of bamboo far from the throngs of tourists who clamber over the grand temples of Angkor, bas-reliefs in rose and gray sandstone stand in solitary splendor.
The gods and demons and half-human, half-animal figures revered by the Angkor civilization were carved at Mount Kulen by anonymous artists, and like countless other artworks disappeared into nature when the empire collapsed 500 years ago.
Now, like much else at Angkor, the carvings are symbols, not only of the mystique of the past, but also of the greed of the present.
In the past six months, the head of one of the figures was gouged from the rock, said Sin Sokhorn, a Cambodian guide who often visits the site by motorcycle. A scar in the rock marked the place where looters had hacked at the statue, leaving a crumpled, headless torso.
The head was probably on display in an antiquities shop in Bangkok or a European city with a handsome price tag, he mused. Or, he suggested, it could be in a private collection of Angkor art, secure from prying eyes.
"We need protection from the looters, but where are we to get it?" asked Sin Sokhorn as he showed the bas-reliefs.
One of the astonishing aspects of the Angkor sites is how they have been diminished at the hand of modern man. Amid the grandeur, empty pedestals, headless carvings and missing lintels cast an aura of indelible loss.
The sudden cascade of tourists - one million foreign visitors arrived in Cambodia last year, and the vast majority went to Angkor - brings many risks: overcrowding, dwindling of the scant local water supply, a cheapening atmosphere.
But the relentless looting strikes at the very artistic and cultural value of one of the world's most admired ancient civilizations, art historians say.
"There is not a single site that is not affected," said Helen Jessup, the founder of Friends of Khmer Culture, an American nongovernmental group. "The Western collectors continue to be as guilty as those who do this."
The art of Angkor was created between the ninth and the 15th centuries in the empire centered on Siem Reap in northern Cambodia, and it has been the target of occupiers and looters since French explorers rediscovered the city in the mid-19th century.
Drawings of the period show large statues strapped to rafts and protected by armed Frenchmen as they floated down rivers on their way to Paris.
In the 1920s, when he was young writer, André Malraux, who later became France's minister of culture, was convicted in an Indochina court for stealing priceless figures from one of the most beautiful temples, Banteay Srei. He was sentenced to three years in prison but never served any jail time.
Cambodia's recent violent history provided an almost ideal opportunity for plundering. The Communist Khmer Rouge destroyed temples and written records, while the occupying Vietnamese Army, well aware of the value of Angkor art in the West, removed pieces by the truckload.
The peace of the 1990s brought some help, but not enough, say scholars and others concerned with the protection of Angkor art.
Apsara, the Cambodian government agency responsible for the protection and management of Angkor, runs a force of guards in gray uniforms who patrol the main temples. Their presence has helped reduce looting at Angkor Wat, the central temple, Cambodian officials say.
But in a recent statement, Apsara acknowledged it was fighting an uphill battle against armed gangs using chain saws and motorcycle brake wire, one of the latest tools for quietly slicing through artifacts. The agency suggested that the Cambodian Army was involved in the destruction.
"Vandalism has multiplied at a phenomenal rate," the agency said.
"Employing local populations to carry out the actual thefts, heavily armed intermediaries transport objects, often in tanks or armored personnel carriers that can be bought across the Thai border."
Out of desperation, many objects have been deliberately removed and placed in safekeeping at the Angkor Conservation Office, a row of buildings behind a high fence in Siem Reap.
In the padlocked rooms, a visitor can see row upon row of the heads of demons, gods, snakes, lions and Buddhas. In one corner, a prized stele inscribed in Sanskrit and listing the wealth of the Ta Prohm monastery stands without any special marker amid a jumble of other artifacts.
A former Cambodian ambassador to the United States, Roland Eng, who recently returned home, said his country was doing its best to protect the Angkor treasures. But he said there were two severe limitations: Cambodia's rock-bottom economy and the exorbitant prices for Angkor art on the international market.
"The country remains very poor; the army is very poor," Eng said.
"There is a high demand for Angkor antiquities. We have to encourage people not to buy any antiques where they cannot trace the source."
He was pleased, he said, that in 2003, the State Department and Cambodia signed a United Nations convention, known as the Cultural Property Implementation Act, that outlaws in the United States the importing or exporting of illicit Cambodian cultural artifacts. The accord has already helped curtail the illegal trade.
"Fewer objects have become available at auction, and the quality has declined," Jessup said.
Even so, Jessup, the curator of a show of Khmer art at the National Gallery of Art in Washington in 1997, said she remained alarmed at the persistence of the pillaging.
Her group is organizing an inventory of the thousands of Angkor-era works in storage at provincial museums and police barracks in Cambodia. If those pieces are stolen and re-emerge on the art market, she said, it will be easier to establish their provenance.
Meanwhile, the destruction continues at a startling rate At Angkor Thom, for example, a 12th-century ruler, Jayavarman VII, built a highly fortified city with five causeways, each one lined with figures of benign gods and fierce demons. After many of the heads were chopped off by looters, the authorities replaced them with concrete copies.
"Even some of those have been taken," Jessup said.
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