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:
"Ashes to ashes and dust to dust,
If the grave don't get you the wood-pile must."
* * * * *
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.