Where the strange trails go down

The Winsome Widow had been very enthusiastic about going to the Celebes because Makassar is the greatest market in the world for those ornaments so dear to the feminine heart—bird-of-paradise plumes. I explained to her that it was against the law to bring them into the United States, but no matter, she wanted to buy some. To visit Makassar without buying bird-of-paradise plumes, she said, would be like visiting Japan without buying a kimono. The bird is usually sold entire, the prices ranging from twenty-five to thirty dollars, according to size and condition, though, owing to the ruthless slaughter of the birds to meet the demands of the European market, prices are steadily advancing. The Winsome Widow bought four of the finest birds I have ever seen—gorgeous, flame-colored things with plumes nearly two feet long. How she proposed getting them into the United States she did not tell me, and I thought it as well not to ask her. She had them carefully packed in a wooden box made for the purpose which she did not open until nearly two months later, when we were steaming down the coast of Siam on a cargo boat, long after I had sent the Negros back to Manila. Imagine her feelings when, upon opening the box to feast her eyes on her contraband treasures, she found it to contain nothing but waste paper! I suspect that the sweetheart of one of our Filipino cabin-boys is now wearing a hat fairly smothered in bird-of-paradise plumes.

The Bugis' love of the sea has given them almost a monopoly of the trade around Celebes. Despite their fierce and warlike dispositions they are industrious and ingenious—qualities which usually do not go together; they practise agriculture more than the neighboring tribes and manufacture cotton cloth not only for their own use but for export. They also drive a thriving trade in such romantic commodities as gold dust, tortoise shell, pearls, nutmegs, camphor, and bird-of-paradise plumes. They dwell for the most part in walled enclosures known as kampongs, in flimsy houses built of bamboo and thatched with grass or leaves. But as diagonal struts are not used the walls soon lean over from the force of the wind, giving to the villages a curiously inebriated appearance. In several of the eight petty states which comprise the confederation of Boni the ruler is not infrequently a woman, the female line having precedence over the male line in succession to the throne. The women rulers of the Bugis have invariably shown themselves as astute, capable and warlike as the men, the princess who ruled in Boni during the middle of the last century having defeated three powerful military expeditions which the Dutch sent against her. Everything considered, the Bugis are perhaps the most interesting race in the entire archipelago.

The Bugis are said to be more predisposed toward "running amok" than any other Malayan people. Having been warned of this unpleasant idiosyncrasy, I took the precaution, when among them, of carrying in the right-hand pocket of my jacket a service automatic, loaded and ready for instant action. For when a Bugi runs amok he will almost certainly get you unless you get him first. Running amok, I should explain, is the native term for the homicidal mania which attacks Malays. Without the slightest warning, and apparently without reason, a Malay, armed with a kris or other weapon, will rush into the street and slash at everybody, friends and strangers alike, until he is killed. These frenzies were formerly regarded as due to sudden insanity, but it is now believed that the typical amok is the result of excitement due to circumstances, such as domestic jealousy or gambling losses, which render the man desperate and weary of life. It is, in fact, the Malay equivalent of suicide. Though so intimately associated with the Malay, there are good grounds for believing the word to have an Indian origin. Certainly the act is far from unknown in Indian history. In Malabar, for example, it was long the custom for the zamorin or king of Calicut to cut his throat in public after he had reigned twelve years. But in the seventeenth century there was inaugurated a variation in this custom. After a great feast lasting for nearly a fortnight the ruler, surrounded by his bodyguard, had to take his seat at a national assembly, on which occasion it was lawful for anyone to attack him, and, if he succeeded in killing him the murderer himself assumed the crown. In the year 1600, it is recorded, thirty men who would be king were killed while thus attempting to gain the throne. These men were called Amar-khan, and it has been suggested that their action was "running amok" in the true sense of the term. From this it would appear that a king of Calicut was about as good an insurance risk as a president of Haiti.

The act of running amok is probably due to causes over which the culprit has some measure of control, as the custom has now virtually died out in the Philippines and in the British possessions in Malaysia, owing to the drastic measures adopted by the authorities. Among the Mohammedans of the southern Philippines, where the custom is known as juramentado, it was discouraged by burying the carcass of a pig—an animal abhorred by all Moslems—in the grave with the body of the assassin. When I was in Jolo the governor told me of a novel and highly effective method which had been adopted by the officer commanding the American forces in that island for discouraging the custom. A number of American soldiers had been killed by Moros running amok. The American commander took up the matter with the local priests but they only shrugged their shoulders with true Oriental stoicism, saying that when a man went juramentado it was the will of Allah and that nothing could be done. The next day an American soldier, a revolver in either hand, burst into a Moro village, notorious for its juramentados, firing at everyone whom he saw and yelling like a mad man. The terrified villagers took to the bush, where they remained in fear and trembling until the crazy Americano had taken his departure. That evening the village priests appeared at headquarters to complain to the American commander.

"But Americans have just as much right to go juramentado as the Moros," said the general. "I can do nothing. The man is not responsible. It is the will of Allah." That was the end of juramentado in Jolo.

The wharves and godowns which line Makassar's water-front form an unattractive screen to a picturesque and charming town. Though, owing to its commercial importance as a half-way station on the road from Asia to Australia, Makassar promises to become a second Singapore, it has as yet neither an electric lighting, gas, nor water system. It is, however, very beautifully laid out, the streets, which are broad and well-kept, being lined by double rows of magnificent canarium trees or tamarinds, whose branches interlace high overhead in a canopy of green. The European life of Makassar centers in the great grass-covered plein, or common, where band concerts, reviews, horse races, festivals, and similar events are held. Facing on the plein is the palace of the Governor of the Celebes, a one-story, porticoed building with white walls and green blinds, in the Dutch colonial style, a type of architecture which is admirably adapted to the tropics. Next to the palace is the Oranje Hotel, a well-kept and comfortable hostelry as hotels go in Malaysia. On its terrace the homesick Europeans gather toward twilight to sip advocat—a drink which is a first cousin to the egg-nogg of pre-Volstead days, very popular in the Indies—and to listen to the military band playing on the plein.

Diagonally across the plein rise the massive walls of Fort Rotterdam, erected by one of the native rulers, the King of Goa, with the assistance of the Portuguese, when the seventeenth century was still in its infancy and when the settlement on the lower end of Manhattan Island was still called Nieuw Amsterdam. The capture of the fort by the Dutch in 1667 signalized the passing of Portuguese power in Asia. Pass the slovenly native sentry at the outer gate, cross the creaking drawbridge, and, were it not for the tropical vegetation and the oppressive heat, you might think yourself in the Low Countries instead of a few degrees below the Line, for the crenelated ramparts, the shaded, gravelled paths, the ancient garrison church, the officers' quarters with their steep-pitched, red-tiled roofs, make the interior a veritable bit of Holland, transplanted to a tropic island half the world away.

Makassar has a population of about fifty thousand, including something over a thousand Europeans and some five thousand Chinese, but as most of the natives live in their walled kampongs in the environs, the city appears much smaller than it really is. The retail trade is almost wholly in the hands of the Chinese, many of whom are men of great wealth and influence. There was also a small colony of Japanese, but, as a result of the boycott which the Chinese had instituted against them in reprisal for Japan's refusal to evacuate Shantung, they were unable to find markets for their wares or to obtain employment and, in consequence, were being forced to leave the island. The only American in the Celebes when we were there was the representative of the Standard Oil Company—a desperately homesick youngster from Missouri who had been a lieutenant of aviation. He introduced himself to us on the terrace of the Oranje Hotel, begged the privilege of buying the drinks, and pleaded with an eagerness that was almost pathetic for the latest news from God's Country. At almost every place of importance which we visited in Malaysia we found these agents of Standard Oil—alert and clean-cut young fellows, who, far from home and friends, are helping to build up a commercial empire for America oversea.

The native soldiery, who form the bulk of the Makassar garrison, are quartered, with their families, in long, stone barracks—ten couples to a room. For every soldier of the colonial forces, whether European or native, is permitted to keep a woman in the barracks with him. If she is the soldier's wife, well and good, but the authorities do not frown if the couple have omitted the formality of standing up before a clergyman. The rooms in which the soldiers and their families live have no partitions, to each couple being assigned a space about eight feet square, which is chalk-marked on the floor. The only article of furniture in each of these "apartments" is a bed, which is really a broad, low platform covered with a grass-mat, for in a land where the mercury not infrequently climbs to 120 in the shade, there is no need for bedding. Here they eat and sleep and make their toilets, the women preparing the meals for their men and for themselves in ovens out-of-doors. At night the beds may be separated by drawing the flimsiest of cotton curtains—the only concession to privacy that I could discover. As Malays invariably have large families, the barrack room usually has the appearance of a day nursery, with naked brown youngsters crawling everywhere, but at night they are disposed of in fiber hammocks which are slung over the parents' heads. The colonel in command at Fort Rotterdam told me that in the new type of barracks which were being built in Java each family would be assigned a separate room, but he seemed to regard such provisions for privacy as wholly unnecessary and a shameful waste of money.

The military authorities not only permit, but encourage the Dutch soldiers to contract alliances of a temporary character with native women during their term of service in the Insulinde, with the idea, no doubt, of making them more contented. During operations in the field the women and children, instead of remaining behind in barracks, accompany the troops almost to the firing-line, a custom which, apparently, does not interfere with efficiency or discipline. Indeed, there are few forces of equal size in the world which have seen as much active service as the army of Netherlands India, for in the extension of Dutch dominion throughout the archipelago the native rulers rarely have surrendered their authority without fighting. Though the newspapers seldom mention it, Holland is almost constantly engaged in some little war in some remote corner of her Indian empire, in certain districts of Sumatra, for example, fighting having been almost continuous these many years.

Though the flag of Holland was first hoisted over the Celebes more than three centuries ago, Dutch commercial interests are still virtually confined to the four chief towns—Makassar, Menado, Gorontalo, and Tondano—and this in spite of the fact that the interior of the island is known to be immensely rich in natural resources. In the native states Dutch authority is little more than nominal, the repeated attempts which have been made to subjugate them invariably having met with discouragement and not infrequently with disaster. Hence the island is still without railways, though it is being slowly opened up by means of roads, some of which are practicable for motor-cars. Most of the roads in the Celebes were originally built by means of the Corvée, or forced labor, the natives being compelled to spend one month out of the twelve in road construction. But, though they were taken for this work at a season when they could best be spared from their fields, it was an enormous tax to impose upon an agricultural population, resulting in grave discontent and in seriously retarding the development of the island. For, ever since Marshal Daendels, "the Iron Marshal," who ruled the Indies under Napoleon, utilized forced labor to build the splendid eight-hundred-mile-long highway which runs from one end of Java to the other, the corvée has been a synonym for unspeakable cruelty and oppression throughout the Insulinde. Each dessa, or district, through which the great trans-Java highway runs was forced to construct, within an allotted period, a certain section of the road, the natives working without pay while their crops rotted in the fields and their families starved. As a final touch of tyranny, the grim old Marshal gave orders that if a dessa did not complete its section of the road within the allotted time the chiefs of that district were to be taken out and hung.

When the Dutch determined to open up Celebes by the construction of a highway system they realized the wisdom of obtaining the cooperation of the native rulers. But when they outlined their scheme to the King of Goa, the most powerful chieftain in the southern part of the island, they encountered, if not open opposition, at least profound indifference. This was scarcely a matter for surprise, however, for the King quite obviously had no use for roads, first, because when he had occasion to journey through his dominions he either rode on horseback or was carried in a palanquin along the narrow jungle trails; secondly, because he was perfectly well aware that by aiding in the construction of roads he would be undermining his own power, for roads would mean white men. To attempt to build a road across Goa in the face of the King's opposition, would, as the Dutch realized, probably precipitate a native uprising, for, without his cooperation, it would be necessary to make use of the corvée to obtain laborers.

But the Governor of the Celebes had been trained in a different school from the Iron Marshal. He believed that with an ignorant and suspicious native, such as the King of Goa, tact could accomplish more than threats. So, instead of attempting to build the road by forced labor, he sent to Batavia for a fine European horse and a luxurious carriage, gaudily painted, which he presented to the King as a token of the government's esteem and friendship. Now the King of Goa, as the governor was perfectly aware, had about as much use for a wheeled vehicle in his roadless dominions as a Bedouin of the Sahara has for a sailboat. But the King did precisely what the governor anticipated that he would do: in order that he might display his new possession he promptly ordered his subjects to build him a carriage road from his capital to Makassar. Thus the government of the Celebes obtained a perfectly good highway for the price of a horse and carriage, and won the friendship of the most powerful of the native rulers into the bargain. After some years, however, the road began to fall into disrepair, but as by this time the novelty of the horse and carriage had worn off, the King took little interest in its improvement. So the governor again had recourse to diplomacy to gain his ends, this time presenting his Goanese Majesty with a motor-car, gorgeous with scarlet paint and polished brass. And, in order that the King might be brought to realize that the roads were not in a condition conducive to comfortable motoring, a young Dutch officer took him for his first motor ride. That ride evidently jolted the memory as well as the body of the dusky monarch, for the next day a royal edict was issued summoning hundreds of natives to put the road in good repair. And, as the King quickly acquired a taste for speeding, in good repair it has remained ever since.

I have related this episode not because it is in itself of any great importance, but because it serves to illustrate the methods used by the Dutch officials in handling recalcitrant or stubborn natives. Though Holland rules her fifty million brown subjects with an iron hand, she has long since learned the wisdom of wearing over the iron a velvet glove.

CHAPTER VII
DOWN TO AN ISLAND EDEN

I went to Bali, which is an island two-thirds the size of Porto Rico, off the eastern extremity of Java, because I wished to see for myself if the accounts I had heard of the surpassing beauty of its women were really true. The Dutch officials whom I had met in Samarinda and Makassar had depicted the obscure little isle as a flaming, fragrant garden, overrun with flowers, a sort of unspoiled island Eden, where bronze-brown Eves with faces and figures of surpassing loveliness disported themselves on the long white beaches, or loitered the lazy days away beneath the palms. But I went there skeptical at heart, for, ever since I journeyed six thousand miles to see the women for whom Circassia has long been undeservedly famous, I have listened with doubt and distrust to the tales told by returned travelers of the nymphs whom they had found, leading an Arcadian existence, on distant tropic isles.

Yet I must admit that, when the anchor of the Negros splashed into the blue waters off Boeleleng, on the northern coast of the island, and a boat's crew of white-clad Filipinos rowed me ashore, I half expected to find a Balinese edition of the Ziegfeld Follies chorus waiting to greet me with demonstrations of welcome and garlands of flowers. What I did find on the wharf was a surly Dutch harbor-master, who, judging from his breath and disposition, had been on a prolonged carouse. Of the women whose beauty I had heard chanted in so many ports, or, indeed, of a native Balinese of any kind, there was no sign. Barring the harbor-master and a handful of Chinese, Boeleleng, which is a place of some size, appeared to be deserted. Yet, as I strolled along its waterfront, I had the uncomfortable feeling that I was being watched by many pairs of unseen eyes.

"Where has everyone gone?" I demanded of the impassive Chinese steward who served me liquid refreshment at the Concordia Club. (Every town in the Insulinde has its Concordia Club, just as every Swiss town has its Grand Hotel.)

"Menjepee," he answered mystically, shrugging his shoulders. "Evlyone stay in house."

"Menjepee, eh?" I repeated. "Never heard of it. Some sort of disease, I suppose, like cholera or plague. If that's why everyone has run away I think that I'd better be leaving."

A ghost of a smile flitted across the Celestial's impassive countenance.

"No clolra. No pleg," he assured me. "Menjepee make by pliest."

Before I could elucidate this curious statement there entered the club a young Hollander immaculate in pipe-clayed topée and freshly starched white linen.

"It's not a disease; it's a religious observance," he explained in perfect English, overhearing my last words. "They call it Menjepee, which, literally translated, means 'silence.' The Balinese are Hindus, you know—about the only ones left in the Islands—and they observe the Hindu festivals very strictly. Their priests raise the very devil with them if they don't. During Menjepee, which lasts twenty-four hours, no native is permitted to set foot outside the wall of his kampong except for the most urgent reasons, and even then he has to get permission from his priest. If he is caught outside his kampong without permission he is heavily fined, to say nothing of being given the cold shoulder by his neighbors."

"I was told in Samarinda," I remarked carelessly, by way of introducing the topic in which I was most interested, "that some of the native girls here in Bali are remarkably good looking."

"I thought you'd be asking about them," the Hollander commented dryly. "That's usually the first question asked by everyone who comes to Bali. But you won't find them on this side of the island. If you want to see them you'll have to cross over to the south side. The prettiest girls are to be found in the vicinity of Den Pasar and Kloeng Kloeng."

"So I had heard," I told him. "I am going to cross the island by motor and have my boat pick me up on the other side. How far is it to Den Pasar?"

"Only about sixty miles and you'll have a tolerably good mountain road all the way. But you can't go today."

"Why not?"

"Menjepee," was the laconic answer. "You won't be able to get anyone to take you. There are only four or five motor cars in Boeleleng and their drivers are all Hindus."

I smothered an expletive of annoyance, for my time was limited and the Negros had already sailed.

"Surely you don't mean to tell me that there is no way in which I can get across the island today?" I demanded. "This Menjepee business is as infernal a nuisance as a taxicab strike in New York."

"Perhaps the Resident might be able to do something for you," my acquaintance suggested after a moment's consideration. "He's a good sort and he's always glad to meet visitors. We don't have many of them here, heaven knows. Look here. I've a sado outside. Suppose you hop in and I'll drive you up to the Residency and you can ask the Resident to help you out."

As we rattled in a sort of governess-cart, called sado, up the broad, palm-lined avenue which leads from Boeleleng to Singaradja, the seat of government, three miles away, I caught fleeting glimpses of natives peering at me furtively over the mud walls which surround their kampongs, but the instant they saw that they were observed they disappeared from view. The Resident I found to be a man of charm and culture who had twice crossed the United States on his way to and from Holland. At first he was dubious whether anything could be done for me, explaining that Menjepee is as devoutly observed by the Hindus of Bali as the fasting month of Ramadan is by the Mohammedans of Turkey, and that the Dutch officials make it a rule never to interfere with the religious observances of the natives. He finally consented, however, to send for the chief priest and see if he could persuade him, in view of my limited time, to grant a special dispensation to a native who could drive a car. I don't know what arguments he used, but they must have been effective, for within the hour we heard the honk of a motor-horn at the Residency gate.

"We have no hotels in Bali," the Resident remarked as I was taking my departure, "but I'll telephone over to the Assistant Resident at Den Pasar to have a room ready for you at the passangrahan—that's the government rest-house, you know. And I'll also send word to the Controleur at Kloeng Kloeng that you are coming and ask him to arrange some native dances for you. He's very keen about that sort of thing and knows where to get the best dancers in the island."

"Tell me," I queried, as I was about to enter the car, "are these girls I've heard so much about really pretty?"

The Resident smiled cynically.

"Well," he replied, and I thought that I could detect a note of homesickness in his voice, "it depends upon the point of view. When you first arrive in Bali you swear that they are the prettiest brown-skinned women in the world. But after you have been here a year or so you get so tired of everything connected with the tropics that you don't give the best of them a second glance. For my part, give me a plain, wholesome-looking Dutch girl with a lusty figure and corn-colored hair and cheeks like apples in preference to all the cafe-au-lait beauties in Bali."

"Au revoir," I called, as I signaled to the driver and the car leaped forward. "If I listen to you any longer I shall have no illusions left."

Save only its western end, which is covered with dense jungle inhabited by tigers and boa-constrictors, Bali is a vast garden, ablaze with the most gorgeous flowers that you can imagine and criss-crossed by a net-work of hard, white roads which alternately wind through huge cocoanut plantations or skirt interminable paddy fields. From the coast the ground rises steadily to a ridge formed by a central range of mountains, which culminate in the imposing, cloud-wreathed Peak of Bali, two miles high. Streams rushing down from the mountains have cut the rich brown loam of the lowlands into deep ravines, down which the brawling torrents make their way to the sea between high banks smothered in tropical vegetation. The most remarkable feature of the landscape, however, are the rice terraces, built by hand at an incredible cost of time and labor, which climb the slopes of the mountains, tier on tier, like the seats in a Roman ampitheatre, sometimes to a height of three thousand feet or more, constituting one of the engineering marvels of the world.

The southern slope of the divide appeared to be much more thickly peopled than the northern, for, as we sped down the steep grades with brakes a-squeal, villages of mud-walled, straw-thatched huts became increasingly frequent, nor did the natives appear to be observing Menjepee as strictly as in the vicinity of Boeleleng, for they stood in the gateways of their kampongs and waved at us as we whirled past, and more than once we saw groups of them squatting in a circle beside the road, engaged in the national pastime of cock-fighting. Now we began to encounter the women whose beauty is famous throughout Malaysia: glorious, up-standing creatures with great masses of blue-black hair, a faint couleur de rose diffusing itself through their skins of brown satin. They were taller than any other women I saw in Malaysia, lithe and supple as Ruth St. Denis, and bearing themselves with a quiet dignity and lissome grace. From waist to ankle they were tightly wrapped in kains of brilliant batik, which defined, without revealing, every line and contour of their hips and lower limbs, but from the waist up they were entirely nude, barring the flame-colored flowers in their dusky hair.

Unlike most Malays, the eyes of the Balinese, instead of being oblique, are set straight in the head. The nose, which frequently mars what would otherwise be well-nigh perfect features, is generally small and flat, with too-wide nostrils, though I saw a number of Balinese women with noses which were distinctly aquiline—the result of a strain of European blood, perhaps. The lips are thick, yet well formed; the teeth are naturally regular and white but are all too often stained scarlet with betel-nut, which is to the Balinese girl what chewing-gum is to her sister of Broadway. The complexion ranges from a deep but rosy brown to a nuance no darker than that of a European brunette, but in the eyes of the Balinese themselves a golden-yellow complexion, the color of weak tea, is the perfection of female beauty. But the chief charm of these island Eves is found, after all, not in their faces but in their figures—slender, rounded, willowy, deep-bosomed, such as Botticelli loved to paint.

Despite the alluring tales brought back by South Sea travelers of the radiant creatures who go about unclad as when they were born, I have myself found no spot, save only Equatorial Africa, where women dispense with clothing habitually and without shame. Indeed, I have seen girls far more scantily clad on the stage of the Ziegfeld Roof or the Winter Garden than I ever have in those distant lands which have not yet received the blessings of civilization. In most of the Polynesian islands the painter or photographer can usually bribe a native girl to disrobe for him, just as in Paris or New York he can find models who for a consideration will pose in the nude, but when the picture is completed she promptly resumes the shapeless and hideous garments of Mother Hubbard cut which the missionaries were guilty of introducing and whose all-enveloping folds, they naïvely believe, form a shield and a buckler against temptations of the flesh. But there are no missionaries in Bali, not one—though the Board of Foreign Missions may interest itself in the islanders after this book appears—and the women continue to dress as they should with such figures and in such a climate.

Because of a flat tire, the driver stopped the car beside a little stream in which two extremely pretty girls were bathing. With the evening sun glinting on their brown bodies and their piquant, oval faces framed by the dusky torrents of their loosened hair, they looked like those bronze maidens which disport themselves in the fountain of the Piazza delle Terme in Rome, come to life. I felt certain that they would take to flight when Hawkinson unlimbered his motion-picture camera and trained it upon them, but they continued their joyous splashing without the slightest trace of self-consciousness or confusion. In fact, when a Balinese girl becomes embarrassed, she does not betray it by covering her body but by drawing over her face a veil which looks like a piece of black fishnet. Their bath completed, the maidens emerged from the water on to the farther bank, paused for a moment to arrange their hair, like wood nymphs of the Golden Age, then wound their gorgeous kains about them and vanished amid the trees. From somewhere on the distant hillside came the sweet, shrill quaver of a reed instrument. The driver said it was a native flute, but I knew better. It was the pipes of Pan....

Rather than that you should be scandalized when you visit Bali, let me make it quite clear that in matters of morality the Balinese women are as easy as an old shoe. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that they are unmoral rather than immoral. This is one of the conditions of life in the Insulinde which must be accepted by the traveler, just as he accepts as a matter of course the heat and the insects and the dirt. Though polygamy is practised, it is confined, because of the expense involved in maintaining a matrimonial stable, to the wealthier chiefs and other men of means. A Turkish pasha who maintained a large harem once told me that polygamy is as trying to the disposition as it is to the pocketbook, because of the incessant jealousies and bickerings among the wives. And I suppose the same conditions obtain in the seraglios of Bali. The former rajah of Kloeng Kloeng, now known as the Regent, a stout and jovial old gentleman arrayed in a cerise kain, a sky-blue head-cloth, and a white jacket with American twenty-dollar gold pieces for buttons, told me with a touch of pride that he had twenty-five wives in his harem. But his pride subsided like a pricked toy balloon when the Controleur, who had overheard the boast, mentioned that another regent, the ruler of a district at the western end of the island, possessed upward of three hundred wives—of the exact number he was not certain as it was constantly fluctuating. To my great regret I could not spare the time to pay a visit to this Balinese Brigham Young. There were a number of questions relative to domestic economy and household administration which I should have liked to have asked him.

Until very recent years, the young Balinese girl who married an old husband incurred the risk of meeting an untimely and extremely unpleasant end, for the island was the last stronghold of that strange and dreadful Hindu custom, suttee—the burning of widows. The last public suttee in Bali was held as recently as 1907, but, in spite of the stern prohibition of the practise by the Dutch, it is said that some women faithful to the old customs and to their dead husbands continue to join the latter on the funeral pyre. In fact, the Controleur at Kloeng Kloeng told me that, only a few weeks before my arrival, two women had begged him on their knees for permission to be burned with the body of the dear departed, whom they wished to share in death as in life.

The Balinese, being devout Hindus, burn their dead, but the cremations are held only twice yearly, being observed as holidays, like Thanksgiving and the Fourth of July. If a man dies shortly before the cremation season is due, his remains are kept in the house until they can be incinerated with befitting ceremony—though I imagine that, in view of the torrid climate, the members of his family perforce move elsewhere for the time being—but if he is so inconsiderate as to postpone his dying until after one of these semi-annual burnings, it becomes necessary to bury him. In a land where the thermometer frequently registers 100 and above, you couldn't keep a corpse around the house for several months, could you? When cremation day comes round again, however, he is dug up, taken to a temple and burned. There is no escaping the funeral-pyre in Bali. As we were leaving one of the cremation places I overheard the Doctor irreverently humming a paraphrase of a song which was very popular in the army during the war:

Unlike the South Sea islanders, who are rapidly dying out as the result of diseases introduced by Europeans, the population of Bali—which is one of the most densely peopled regions in the world, with 325 inhabitants to the square mile—is rapidly increasing, having more than doubled in the last fifteen years. This is due in some measure, no doubt, to the climate, which, though hot, is healthy save in certain low-lying coastal districts, but much more, I imagine, to the fact that there are scarcely a hundred Europeans on the island, and that, as there are no harbors worthy the name, European vessels rarely touch there. It is well for the Balinese that their enchanted island has no harbors, for harbors mean ships, and ships mean white men, and white men, particularly sailors, all too often leave undesirable mementoes of their visits behind them.

The men of Bali are a fine, strong, dignified, rather haughty race, fit mates in physique for their women. They are considerably taller than any other Malays whom I saw and possess less Mongoloid and Negroid characteristics, these being subdued by some strong primeval alien strain which is undoubtedly Caucasian. Though now peaceable enough, every Balinese man carries in his sash a kris—the long, curly-bladed knife which is the national weapon of Malaysia. Most of the krises that I examined were more ornamental than serviceable, some of them having scabbards of solid gold and hilts set with precious stones. Moreover, they are worn against the middle of the back, where they must be difficult to reach in an emergency. I imagine that the kris, universal though it is, serves as a symbol of former militancy rather than as a fighting weapon, just as the buttons at the back of our tailcoats serve to remind us that their original purpose was to support a sword-belt. But, though the Balinese have made no serious trouble for their Dutch rulers for upward of a decade, they long resisted European domination, as evidenced by the four bloody uprisings in the last three-quarters of a century—the last was in 1908—which were suppressed only with difficulty and considerable loss of life. When the shells from the gunboats began to burst over their towns, the rajahs, recognizing that their cause was lost, nerved themselves with opium and committed the traditional puputan, or, with their wives, threw themselves on the Dutch bayonets. But, though the Balinese have bowed perforce to the authority of the stout young woman who dwells in The Hague, they have none of the cringing servility, that look of pathetic appeal such as you see in the eyes of dogs which have been mistreated, so characteristic of the Javanese.

Though the three-quarters of a million natives in Bali have behind them the traditions of countless wars, the Dutch, who seem to possess an extraordinary talent for governing brown-skinned peoples, maintain their authority with a few companies of native soldiery officered by a handful of Europeans. The success of the Dutch in ruling Malays, who are notoriously turbulent and warlike, is largely due to the fact that, so long as the customs of the natives are not inimical to good government or to their own well-being, they studiously refrain from interfering with them. Nor is there the same social chasm separating Europeans and natives in the Insulinde which is found in Britain's Eastern possessions. Were a British official in India to marry a native woman he would be promptly recalled in disgrace; if a Dutch official marries a native woman she is accorded the same social recognition as her husband. Though in the old days probably ninety per cent of the Dutch officials and planters in the Insulinde lived with native women, these unions are constantly decreasing, today probably not more than ten per cent of the Europeans thus solving their domestic problems. It struck me, moreover, that the Dutch are more in sympathy with their native subjects, that they understand them better, than the British. It is a remarkable thing, when you stop to think of it, that a little nation like Holland, with a colonial army of less than thirty-five thousand men and no fleet worthy of the name, should be able to maintain its authority over fifty millions of natives, ten thousand miles away, with so little friction.

We passed the night in the small rest-house at Den Pasar which the government maintains for the use of its officials. I have said that we passed the night, mark you; I refuse to toy with the truth to the extent of saying that we slept. Why they call it a rest-house I cannot imagine. Never that I can recall, save only in a zoo, have I found myself on such intimate terms with so many forms of animal life as in that passangrahan. Cockroaches nearly as large as mice (before you raise your eyebrows at this statement talk with anyone who has traveled in Malaysia), spiders, centipedes, ants and beetles made my bedroom an entomologist's paradise. Some large winged animal, presumably a fruit-bat or a flying-fox, entered by the window and circled the room like an airplane; and, judging from the sounds which proceeded from beneath the bed, I gathered that the room also harbored a snake or a large rat, though which I was not certain as I saw no reason for investigating. A family of lizards disported themselves on the ceiling and when I menaced them with a stick they departed so hastily that one of them abandoned his tail, which dropped on the wash-stand. A squadron of mosquitoes—a sort of escadrille de chasse, as it were—kept me awake until daybreak, when they were relieved by a skirmishing party of cimex lectulariae, which are well known in America under a shorter and less polite name. Fishes only were absent, but I am convinced that their neglect of me was due to ignorance of my presence. Had they known of it I feel certain that the climbing fish, which is one of the curiosities of these waters, would have flopped on to my pillow.

Upon our arrival at Kloeng Kloeng I found the Controleur, who had been notified by the Resident at Singaradja of our coming, had made arrangements for an elaborate series of native dances to be given that afternoon on the lawn of the residency. It is a simple matter to arrange a dance in Bali, for every village, no matter how small, supports a ballet, and usually a troupe of actors as well, just as an American community supports a baseball team. The money for the gorgeous costumes worn by the dancers is raised by local subscription and the ballet frequently visits the neighboring towns to give exhibitions or to engage in competitions, contingents of the dancers' townspeople usually going along to root for them.

The Balinese dances require many years of arduous and constant training. A girl is scarcely out of the sling by which Balinese children are carried on the mother's back before, under the tutelage of her mother, who has herself perhaps been a dancing-girl in her time, she begins the severe course of gymnastics and muscle training which are the foundations of all Eastern dances. From infancy until, not yet in her teens, she becomes a member of the village ballet or enters the harem of a local rajah, she is as assiduously trained and groomed as a race-horse entered for the Derby. From morning until night, day after day, year after year, the muscles of her shoulders, her back, her hips, her legs, her abdomen are suppled and developed until they will respond to her wishes as readily as her slender, henna-stained fingers.

The lawn on which the dances were held sloped down, like a great green rug, from the squat white residency to an ancient Hindu temple, whose walls, of red-brown sandstone, were transformed by the setting sun into rosy coral. The Bali temples are but open courtyards enclosed within high walls, their entrances flanked by towering gate-posts, grotesquely carved. Within the courtyards, which have arrangements for the cremation of the dead as well as for the refreshment of the living, are numerous roofed platforms and small, elevated shrines, reached by steep flights of narrow steps, every square inch being covered with intricate and fantastic carvings. These carvings are for the most part beautifully colored, so that, when illuminated by the sun, they look like those porcelain bas-reliefs which one buys in Florence, or, if the colors are undimmed by age, like Persian enamel. In some of the temples which I visited, the colorings had been ruthlessly obliterated by coats of whitewash, but in those communities where Hinduism is still a living force, the inhabitants frequently impoverish themselves in order to provide the gold-leaf with which the interiors of the shrines are covered, just as the congregations of American churches praise God with carven pulpits and windows of stained glass.

The stage setting for the dances consisted of a small, portable pagoda, heavily gilded and set with mirrors—nothing more, unless you include the backdrop provided by the Indian Ocean. On either side of the pagoda, which was set in the centre of the lawn, squatted a motionless native holding a long-handled parasol of gold, known as a payong. So far as I could discover, the purpose of these parasol holders was purely ornamental, like the palms that flank a concert stage, for they never stirred throughout the four hours that the dancing lasted. The dancers themselves were extremely young—barely in their teens, I should say—but I could only guess their ages as their faces were so heavily enameled that they might as well have been wearing masks. Their costumes, faithful reproductions of those depicted in the carvings on the walls of the temples, were of a gorgeousness which made the creations of Bakst seem colorless and tame: tightly-wound kains of cloth-of-gold over which were draped silks in all the colors of the chromatic scale. Their necks and arms, which were stained a saffron yellow, were hung with jewels or near-jewels. On their heads were towering, indescribable affairs of feathers, flowers and tinsel, faintly reminiscent of those fantastic headdresses affected by the lamented Gaby. The music was furnished by a gamelan, or orchestra, of half-a-hundred musicians playing on drums, gongs and reeds, with a few xylophones thrown in for good measure. I am no judge of music, but it seemed to me that when the gamelan was working at full speed it compared very favorably with an American jazz orchestra.

All the dances illustrated episodes from the Ramayana or other Hindu mythologies localized, the story being recited in a monotonous, sing-song chant, in the old Kawi or sacred language, by a professional accompanist who sat, cross-legged, in the orchestra. As a result of constant drilling since babyhood, the Balinese dancers attain a perfection of technique unknown on the western stage, but the visitor who expects to see the verve and abandon of the Indian dances as portrayed by Ruth St. Denis is certain to be disappointed. To tell the truth, the dances of Bali, like those I saw in Java and Cambodia, are rather tedious performances, beautiful, it is true, but almost totally lacking in that fire and spirit which we associate with the East. It is probable, however, that I am not sufficiently educated in the art of Terpsichore to appreciate them. It was as though I had been given a selection from Die Niebelungen Lied when I had looked for rag-time. But the natives are passionately fond of them, it being by no means uncommon, I was told, for a dance to begin in the late afternoon and continue without interruption until daybreak. The Controleur told me that he planned to utilize his next long leave in taking a native ballet to Europe, and, perhaps, to the United States. So, should you see the Bali dancers advertised to appear on Broadway, I strongly advise you not to miss them.

Instead of going to Palm Beach next winter, or to Havana, or to the Riviera, why don't you go out to Bali and see its lovely women, its curious customs, and its superb scenery for yourself? You can get there in about eight weeks, provided you make good connections at Singapore and Surabaya. With no railways, no street-cars, no hotels, no newspapers, no theatres, no movies, it is a very restful place. You can lounge the lazy days away in the cool depths of flower-smothered verandahs, with a brown house-boy pulling at the punkah-rope and another bringing you cool drinks in tall, thin glasses—for the Volstead Act does not run west of the 160th meridian—or you can stroll in the moonlight on the long white beaches with lithe brown beauties who wear passion-flowers in their raven hair. Or, should you weary of so dolce far niente an existence, you can sail across to Java with the opium-runners in their fragile prahaus, or climb a two-mile-high volcano, or in the jungles at the western extremity of the island stalk the clouded tiger. And you can wear pajamas all day long without apologizing. Everything considered, Bali offers more inducements than any place I know to the tired business man or the absconding bank cashier.

CHAPTER VIII
THE GARDEN THAT IS JAVA

I entered Java through the back door, as it were. That is to say, instead of landing at Batavia, which is the capital of Netherlands India, and presenting my letters of introduction to the Governor-General, Count van Limburg Stirum, I landed at Pasuruan, at the eastern extremity of the six-hundred-mile-long island. It was as though a foreigner visiting the United States were to land at Sag Harbor, on the far end of Long Island, instead of at New York. I learned afterward, from the American Consul-General at Batavia, that in doing this I committed a breach of etiquette. Though the Dutch make no official objections to foreigners landing where they please in their Eastern possessions, they much prefer to have them ring the front doorbell, hand in their cards, and give the authorities an opportunity to look them over. In these days, with Bolshevik emissaries stealthily at work throughout the archipelago, the Dutch feel that it behooves them to inspect strangers with some care before giving them the run of the islands.

We landed at Pasuruan because it is the port nearest to Bromo, the most famous of the great volcanoes of Eastern Java, but as there is no harbor, only a shallow, unprotected roadstead, it was necessary for the Negros to anchor nearly three miles offshore. So shallow is the water, indeed, that it is a common sight at low tide to see the native fishermen standing knee-deep in the sea a mile from land. Until quite recently debarkation at Pasuruan was an extremely uncomfortable and undignified proceeding, the passengers on the infrequent vessels which touch there being carried ashore astride of a rail borne on the shoulders of two natives. A coat of tar and feathers was all that was needed to make the passenger feel that he was a victim of the Ku Klux Klan. But a narrow channel has now been dredged through the sand-bar so that row-boats and launches of shallow draught can make their way up the squdgy creek to the custom house at high tide.

Until half a century ago Pasuruan was counted as one of the four great cities of Java, but with the extension of the railway system throughout the island and the development of the harbor at Surabaya, forty miles away, its importance steadily diminished, though traces of its one-time prosperity are still visible in its fine streets and beautiful houses, most of which, however, are now occupied by Chinese. Perhaps the most interesting feature of the place today is found in the costumes of the native women, particularly the girls, who wear a kind of shirt and veil combining all the colors of the rainbow.

From Pasuruan to Tosari, which is a celebrated hill-station and the gateway to the volcanoes of eastern Java, is about twenty-five miles, with an excellent motor road all the way. For the first ten miles the road, here a wide avenue shaded by tamarinds and djati trees, runs across a steaming plain, between fields of rice and cane, but after Pasrepan the ascent of the mountains begins. The highway now becomes extremely steep and narrow, with countless hairpin turns, though all danger of collision is eliminated by the regulations which permit no down-traffic in the morning and no up-traffic in the afternoon. During the final fifteen miles, in which is made an ascent of more than six thousand feet, one has the curious experience of passing, in a single hour, from the torrid to the temperate zone. In the earlier stages of the ascent the road zigzags upward through magnificent tropical forests, where troops of huge gray apes chatter in the upper branches and grass-green parrots flash from tree to tree. Palms of all varieties, orchids, tree-ferns, bamboos, bananas, mangoes, gradually give way to slender pines; the heavy odors of the tropics are replaced by a pleasant balsamic fragrance; the hillsides become clothed with familiar flowers—daisies, buttercups, heliotrope, roses, fuchsias, geraniums, cannas, camelias, Easter lilies, azaleas, morning glories, until the mountain-slopes look like a vast old-fashioned garden. In the fields, instead of rice and cane, strawberries, potatoes, cabbages, onions, and corn, are seen. As the road ascends the air becomes cold and very damp; rain-clouds gather on the mountains and there are frequent showers. At one point the mist became so thick that I could scarcely discern the figure of my chauffeur and we were compelled to advance with the utmost caution, for at many points the road, none too wide at best, falls sheer away in dizzy precipices. But as suddenly as it came, just as suddenly did the mist lift, revealing the great plain of Pasuruan, a mile below, stretching away, away, until its green was blended with the turquoise of the Java Sea. It is a veritable Road of a Thousand Wonders, but there are spots where those who do not relish great heights and narrow spaces will explain that they prefer to walk so that they may gather wild-flowers.

Were it not for the wild appearance of its Tenngri mountaineers, Tosari, which is the best health resort in Java, might be readily mistaken for an Alpine village, for it has the same steep and straggling streets, the same weather-beaten chalets clinging precariously to the rocky hillsides, the same quaint shops, their windows filled with souvenirs and postcards, the same glorious view of green valleys and majestic peaks, the same crisp, cool air, as exhilarating as champagne. The Sanatarium Hotel, which is always filled with sallow-faced officials and planters from the plains, consists of a large main building built in the Swiss chalet style and numerous bungalows set amid a gorgeous garden of old-fashioned flowers. Every bedroom has a bath—but such a bath!—a damp, gloomy, cement-lined cell having in one corner a concrete cistern, filled with ice-cold mountain water. The only furniture is a tin dipper. And it takes real courage, let me tell you, to ladle that icy water over your shivering person in the chill of a mountain morning.

The mountain slopes in the vicinity of Tosari are dotted with the wretched wooden huts of the native tribe called Tenggerese, the only race in Java which has remained faithful to Buddhism. There are only about five thousand of them and they keep to themselves in their own community, shut out from the rest of the world. They are shorter and darker than the natives of the plains and, like most savages, are lazy, ignorant and incredibly filthy. Because the air is cool and dry, and water rather scarce, they never bathe, preferring to remain dirty. As a result the aroma of their villages is a thing not soon forgotten. The doors of their huts, which have no windows, all face Mount Bromo, where their guardian deity, Dewa Soelan Iloe, is supposed to dwell. Once each year the Tenggerese hold a great feast at the foot of the volcano, and, until the Dutch authorities suppressed the custom, were accustomed to conclude these ceremonies by tossing a living child into the crater as a sacrifice to their god. Though an ancient tradition forbids the cultivation of rice by the Tenggerese, they earn a meager living by raising vegetables, which they carry on horseback to the markets on the plain, and by acting as guides and coolies. They are incredibly strong and tireless, the two men who carried Hawkinson's heavy motion-picture outfit to the summit of Bromo making the round trip of forty miles in a single day over some of the steepest trails I have ever seen.

Growing on the mountainsides about Tosari are many bushes of thorn apple, called Datara alba, their white, funnel-shaped flowers being sometimes twelve inches long. From the seeds of the thorn apple the Tenggerese make a sort of flour which is strongly narcotic in its effect. Because of this quality, it is occasionally utilized by burglars, who blow it into a room which they propose to rob, through the key-hole, thereby drugging the occupants into insensibility and making it easy for the burglars to gain access to the room and help themselves to its contents. Which reminds me that in some parts of Malaysia native desperadoes are accustomed to pound the fronds of certain varieties of palm to the consistency of powdered glass. They carry a small quantity of this powder with them and when they meet anyone against whom they have a grudge they blow it into his face. The sharp particles, being inhaled, quickly affect the lungs and death usually results. A friend of mine, for many years an American consul in the East, once had the misfortune to be next to the victim of such an attack, and himself inhaled a small quantity of the deadly powder. The lung trouble which shortly developed hastened, if it did not actually cause, his death.

That we might reach the Moengal Pass at daybreak in order to see the superb panorama of Bromo and the adjacent volcanoes as revealed by the rising sun, we started from Tosari at two o'clock in the morning. Our mounts were wiry mountain ponies, hardy as mustangs and sure-footed as goats. And it was well that they were, for the trail was the steepest and narrowest that I have ever seen negotiated by horses. The Bright Angel Trail, which leads from the rim of the Grand Canon down to the Colorado, is a Central Park bridle-path in comparison. In places the grade rose to fifty per cent and in many of the descents I had to lean back until my head literally touched the pony's tail. It recalled the days, long past, when, as a student at the Italian Cavalry School, I was called upon to ride down the celebrated precipice at Tor di Quinto. But there, if your mount slipped, a thick bed of sawdust was awaiting you to break the fall. Here there was nothing save jagged rocks. We started in pitch darkness and for three hours rode through a night so black that I could not see my pony's ears. The trail, which in places was barely a foot wide, ran for miles along a sort of hogback, the ground falling sheer away on either side. It was like riding blindfolded along the ridgepole of a church, and, had my pony slipped, the results would have been the same.

But the trials of the ascent were forgotten in the overwhelming grandeur of the scene which burst upon us as, just at sunrise, we drew rein at the summit of the Moengal Pass. Never, not in the Rockies, nor the Himalayas, nor the Alps, have I seen anything more sublime. At our feet yawned a vast valley, or rather a depression, like an excavation for some titanic building, hemmed in by perpendicular cliffs a thousand feet in height. Wafted by the morning breeze a mighty river of clouds poured slowly down the valley, filling it with gray-white fleece from brim to brim. Slowly the clouds dissolved before the mounting sun until there lay revealed below us the floor of the depression, known as the Sand Sea, its yellow surface, smooth as the beach at Ormond, slashed across by the beds of dried-up streams and dotted with clumps of stunted vegetation. Like the Sahara it is boundless—a symbol of solitude and desolation. When, in the early morning or toward nightfall, the conical volcanoes cast their lengthening shadows upon this expanse of sand, it reminds one of the surface of the moon as seen through a telescope. But at midday, beneath the pitiless rays of the equatorial sun, it resembles an enormous pool of molten brass, the illusion being heightened by the heat-waves which flicker and dance above it. From the center of the Sand Sea rises the extinct crater of Batok, a sugar-loaf cone whose symmetrical slopes are so corrugated by hardened rivulets of lava that they look for all the world like folds of gray-brown cloth. Beyond Batok we could catch a glimpse of Bromo itself, belching skyward great clouds of billowing smoke and steam, while from its crater came a rumble as of distant thunder. And far in the distance, its purple bulk faintly discernible against the turquoise sky, rose Smeroe, the greatest volcano of them all.