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[144] 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.
[145]"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[146] 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[147] 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[148] 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[149] 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 [150]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[151] the missionaries were guilty of introducing and whose all-enveloping folds, they na?vely 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[152] 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 [153]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 questio............