51
36. ซื่อ 'right' has been misread by B, S, and P, as ชื่อ 'name' both here and in 26 above.
41. In all my earlier attempts to read it, the first word of this line seemed hopelessly lost in the corrosion of the surface of the stone. The transliteration therefore left the space unfilled. A last exhaustive scrutiny of the writing, however, undertaken in the preparation of the plates, convinces me that S and P were right in reading กลาง. Traces which to the eye were completely lost, were brought out in a careful 'rub'. A similar gap, with similar uncertainty as to what should fill it, is found at the beginning of the next line. S and P insert ใส repeated from the preceding context. But it seems hardly logical to say 'clear as it is to drink water of the Khong.' Since I have no alternative suggestion to make, I prefer to leave the space unfilled, as does RS.
43. The gap noted above seems to have been caused by a drip of water, which has excavated a deep narrow channel that extends continuously some six lines further, and then with interruptions quite to the lower edge of this face of the stone. While in this line it has not entirely effaced any one of the three letters involved, it has left the reconstruction of the text more perplexed than ever. The real trouble is to discover anything that will make intelligible sense in the same phrase with ตรี at the end of 42. นี้ has definitely closed the adverbial phrase preceding ตรี, leaving that word to begin the subject phrase. That word is the Indian numeral 'three', likely to be used only in some compound name or title. The general sense, which fortunately is unmistakable, calls for something equivalent to 'circuit', or 'distance' or perhaps 'wall'. The fragmentary traces at the beginning of the line suggest บูร with a faint line which might be part of an ไ, making ได้ with the letter following. But no word fulfiling these conditions has yet been found. S and P read "tripura dai", and translate "les trois faubourgs compris". But the idea of faubourgs as constituent parts of a municipality seems wholly foreign to Siamese thought, nor would the Siamese apply to faubourgs separately the term 'pura' (buri) 'fenced city', which includes all its parts. RS reads ไป, which is within the possibilities of the stone, but which leaves ตรี entirely unaccounted for.
