and intimacy, and even worse, equality, so abhorrent from the colonial point of view. You must keep your distance, said the manager; the correct place for a white man is in the back seat. In the old days, he continued, Hollanders married natives; to-day it is different. Take them to bed if you like, but see they come in at the back door.
He spoke in heavy earnestness, but without hatred. He was a red-faced man, forever dripping sweat. He bullied his boys, sometimes in roaring fury, sometimes in tired routine. Yet he must have got on with them, nevertheless, for the service was excellent.
Ahmat! he shouted, as we sat in the lobby. Ahmat! he bellowed, and I thought his voice would shatter the glass over the huge picture of the Queen of the Netherlands that hung above us.
A slim figure approached.
Bring two gin-bitters, and hurry!
He blotted his forehead with a damp handkerchief.
Lazy! he complained. You can teach them nothing. Ten years I’ve been here, he moaned. If it weren’t for the girls. . . . Did you notice the little one by the door selling rings?
We finished our drinks and I got up. He had a final word for me.
I don’t like to see you there in the front seat. The white man must never forget to maintain the dignity of the white race.
He gave a gentle belch.
Then as an afterthought he added, If you really must sit in front, drive the car yourself and let the chauffeur sit behind.
But I continued to sit the way I pleased. We drove with the top down, the hot sun beating on our heads. It was only when we passed the tennis court or entered the hotel driveway that I felt self-conscious, ostentatious and subversive.
At the hotel itineraries were posted for those who had only a few days on the island. Each day was crammed from dawn till sundown. “Thurs. a.m.: sacred pool; tombs of the kings; palace at Karangasem; lunch at resthouse. Afternoon: bats’ cave; sacred forest; giant banyan; hot springs. Dance performance at hotel, 9 p.m.”
I preferred to drive at random through the island, getting lost in the network of back roads that ran up into the hills where, as you looked down towards the sea, the flooded rice-fields lay shining in the sunlight like a broken mirror. The sound of music seemed forever in the air. People sang in the fields or in the streams as they bathed. From behind village walls rose the sound of flutes and cymbals as invisible musicians rehearsed at all hours of the day and night. Temples in a state of celebration shook with the heavy beat of drums, the throb of enormous gongs, and as we drove home at night we passed through village after village where, by the roadside, amid a blaze of little lamps, people had gathered to sit and watch the puppets of the shadow-play.
As the car ascended from the sea into the mountains, the style and mood of the music seemed to change. In the lowlands, musicians played with a bright vivacity, while music shimmered with ornamentation, rich and complicated as the ornamented temples themselves. But in the hills, as you travelled higher and higher, among villages that lay farther and farther apart, the music, like the architecture of the temples, grew more austere, took on an air of increasing antiquity and severity. Here, in the mists and clouds, where temple walls were green with moss and roofs overgrow with ferns, only rarely was the quiet broken by the grave sound of ancient ritual music at some village feast.
Although Sarda was clearly bored by these excursions into the hills (Mountain style! he would remark loftily while we watched some slow-moving dance) he soon grew resigned to stopping the car at the sound of music. I would get out, and make my way through the crowd to where the musicians were gathered. No one seemed to mind this intrusion in the least, and as I sat there, listening, and watching the confused events of a temple feast, the women with their towers of offerings, the ceremonial dancing before the altars, the processions and the bursting firecrackers, all sense of time had vanished completely.
Sometimes, after a long morning of casual exploration, Sarda would stop at the market-place of some village, where we would sit at the little coffee-stall for a glass of tea or tepid beer. Above the murmur of the market there drifted from the open door of the tiny Government school the sound of children’s voices, sleepily chanting the multiplication table to the rap of a ruler. The presence of the car was not long in attracting a group of boys. Comments began.
Essex.
No, Buick 1927. An old model.
An old man would ask: How can it be? A chariot going like that, along, without horse or cow.
Unsympathetic laughter banished him to the dark ages.
Wake up, grandfather, think! You push in the foot, pull the handle and it goes.
Sarda listened in scornful silence. He would turn to me.
The talk of mountain people! He would start the car with a flourish, and we departed with magnificent suddenness, like gods.
In the early morning the island had a golden freshness, dripped and shone with moisture like a garden in a florist’s window. By noon it had become hard and matter-of-fact. But in the late afternoon the island was transformed once more; it grew unreal, lavish and theatrical like old-fashioned opera scenery. As the sun neared the horizon men and women turned the colour of new copper,. while shadows grew purple, the grass blue, and everything white reflected a deep rose.
One evening, as we drove along, the full moon rose above the fields, scarlet, enormous, distorted beyond belief in the invisible haze. I told Sarda to stop the car, and sat looking in silence. A tone of romantic enthusiasm in my voice, possibly, had set Sarda thinking, for suddenly he asked,
In America you have no moon, perhaps?
He spoke so simply I could not tell if irony were intended or not. I told him we had, and at this he started the car, saying I would be late for dinner at the hotel.
It was during this first week that, one late afternoon, we came to a village bright with banners and streamers. In front of the temple a crowd was gathered, and the sound of swift, complicated music filled the air. I pushed through the wall of people to a clearing, where at one end sat the musicians among their instruments. At the other end a pair of curtains stretched on a wire marked a stage entrance.
The music rose and fell with almost feverish intensity. Before the orchestra two drummers leaned forward over their drums, their hands beating against the drum-ends like moth wings against a lamp. Suddenly the music came to a halt. There was a pause, while the players rested. But soon they came to attention once more. They picked up their little hammers and mallets; there was a signal-accent from the first drummer, and once more the music broke on the air like a shower.
The curtains parted, and through them appeared a child (could she be nine?) clad apparently in gold. The setting sun cast a spotlight through the trees, and she glittered like an insect as she moved. Soon she was followed by two others; the folds in their skirts were stiff and metallic, and in each headdress golden flowers nodded from the ends of wires and trembled with each motion of the body. Dance and music were like a single impulse. The children darted like humming-birds. Their gestures had infinite elegance, and they seemed like little statues, intricate and delicate, that had come to life—not with suppleness, but, like the sequence of images in a film, in a series of poses that lasted the mere fraction of a second. You felt they were conscious of every sixteenth-note in the music.
At first the dance was formal and abstract. The story had not yet begun, said Sarda. But soon it grew clear that a drama was unfolding. There was a scene of tenderness,
