Part 16

Across the water a few early fires flickered in the town. On the dock, high above, a half dozen men began to congregate, squatting to look down at us with friendly curiosity. I decided to see what I could find out, but when I climbed up the ratlines and so to the dock, I met with no success. Phrases I had memorized in Dutch—in Indonesian—in Malay—nothing seemed to arouse any understanding. At last, in desperation, I tried a few words of Japanese—and suddenly we were off! Only then did I remember that Bali had been held by the Japanese from 1942 until the end of the war. Their Japanese was not much better than mine—but different. Anyway, it served and through an exchange of very halting questions-and-answers I learned that all the officials had gone for the day, that it was quite all right for us to remain at the dock overnight, and that Den Pasar, the main city of Bali, was 11 kilometers away and could be reached by bus.

I returned to the deck, where we had a leisurely supper and turned in early. To tell the truth, I was utterly exhausted. The family took a short walk, but came back to report nothing of interest on our side of the harbor except the dock buildings, a long, deserted causeway stretching into the distance across tidal flats, and a stack of long wicker baskets like porous sausages, each of which contained—a real, live pig!

Even this news failed to arouse me. However the Balinese arranged to package and store their bacon for export, it could wait, I decided, until morning.

10 BALI, JAVA, THE KEELING-COCOS

“A sense of uneasy anticipation....”

Bali was worth all the trouble it took to get there. Not only is it spectacularly beautiful, with its rugged mountains, its misty vales, its crumbling temples, and the glossy green of its rice paddies, but the people are beautiful too. Outside of Den Pasar, where the tourists congregate and create understandable disruptions and where it is considered “rude” for women to go about unclothed above the waist, the Balinese serenely follow their age-old customs, practice the Hindu religion, which is the hard core of their society, and preserve their independence and integrity.

In contrast to other countries we had visited, even the more remote islands, we saw little influence of the West in Bali. No American movies, not even in Den Pasar; no Cokes or chewing gum. Music could be heard as one strolled the streets of a village at night, and it was not rock and roll but the hauntingly compelling music of Bali, played on drum and gamelin.

Our first act, after officially entering the next morning, was to take the bus to Den Pasar to meet Barbara’s mother. Minnetta herself was on a trip around the world, traveling by a somewhat faster means and at a bit higher altitude, but the motivating aim of her entire junket had been to meet us in Indonesia!

No one seemed to know the bus schedule, but all were happy to show us where to wait for it. Eventually, a dilapidated bus pulled up, so we climbed on and waited. And waited. And _waited_.

Several praus with wishbone sails pulled up to the sea wall and willing hands began to unload. Stalks of bananas, bunches of coconuts, matting bundles were all unloaded, carried up the sloping sea wall to the road and thence up a narrow ladder to the top of the bus.

The driver returned, carrying a woven banana leaf tray on which were a few carefully arranged yellow flowers and a few leaves. He placed this in a niche above the driver’s seat and stuck a stick of burning incense into a holder on the dashboard. (There’s an extra that American models don’t have!) We wondered if he was exorcising whatever demons may have gotten aboard with us.

A little later the people began to get on. Soon the bus was full, but still we waited. Down at the waterfront another prau came in. This one was loaded to the gunwales with large turtles and Barbara scrambled out with her camera.

“Don’t let them go without me!” she warned, stalking her photographic prey.

She didn’t have to go to the shore for her pictures, however. Her subjects were being brought to her, each turtle borne upside down on the shoulders of a man who walked with it easily up the sloping ladder to the top of the bus and there deposited it neatly.

The last two turtles were too large to be carried by a single man. These were slung from poles and brought up to the road by two men each, who shoved them inside the bus where they just filled the aisle and made an excellent footrest for the passengers, who sat in long seats facing one another. At last we started.

Once we were rolling, we passed beautifully irrigated rice fields, villages with walled compounds, and temples which looked centuries old, with carved elephants or boars guarding their narrow gates. Everywhere we saw evidences of the rice harvest: rows of workers in the fields, seemingly bowed over beneath the weight of huge mushroom-shaped hats as they cut the ripened grain; men and women carrying sheaves to be threshed, the men with two full shocks swinging from each end of a pole across the shoulders, the women with a single, larger bundle balanced on the head.

Throughout the Balinese countryside women apparently have not heard of the regulation, promulgated in Java, that they must be “properly clothed” or, if they have heard of it, they pay it the same attention that the Balinese, through the centuries, traditionally have paid to the directives of their alien rulers: they ignore it. In the dooryards the lovely bodies of the women, clothed only in a sarong of patterned batik, moved in graceful rhythm as they bounced an upright pole first with one hand, then with the other, to thresh the grain which had been spread on mats to dry.

In Den Pasar we got off at the wide dirt lot which is the bus terminus and transferred to a doh-ka, the pony-cart-for-two which is the picturesque means of travel through the city streets. The driver whipped his tiny horse to a gallop, the plume of bells on its head jingled merrily, and in no time at all we were deposited in front of the Bali Hotel, where Minnetta was waiting on the porch.

She was far too travel-wise to be living at the Bali Hotel, however. Already she had found lodgings, at one-fifth the tourist rate, at a small Balinese hotel on a side street. That night Barbara stayed with her there and, on the way back from seeing the rest of us off at the bus terminal, she managed to get herself completely lost. Through this happy accident she made the acquaintance of Igusti Rai Suwandi, a charming young Indonesian of Ted’s age who had been studying English in school. Rai (Igusti, we learned, is a title of caste and not a proper name) was happy to show Barbara back to her hotel and practice his English.

“Tomorrow I come again,” he promised. “I will meet your son. I will show him many things. If he will come by me for two days I will show him fete of young girl who become big.”

This event, which took place _in_ two days, turned out to be the coming-of-age ceremony for a young cousin, and Rai invited our whole family to attend. At the appointed time he took us to the outer courtyard of his “oldest brother’s wife’s father’s home.” We found it overflowing with milling tourists from the Bali Hotel who were busily taking pictures of suckling pigs turning on a spit and lovely girls passing through from the street to the inner courtyard with trays of food on their heads.

Our hearts sank. We had hoped for more than this, colorful as it was. But we needn’t have worried. Rai led us through the crowd, up some stone steps, through a narrow doorway in the brick wall, and down to the inner courtyard—and another world. All about us were open buildings with thatched roofs, their floors raised above the ground. Each of them was gaily decorated with lengths of bright cloth, flowers, and woven palm leaves. The guests, sitting cross-legged upon the floor of each pavilion, were all wearing native Balinese costume—magnificent sarongs of red or green or blue cloth with designs of gold thread and turbans of batik. They eyed us with curiosity and reserve and, for one horrible second, I wondered if Rai had brashly invited us without consulting his elders. Almost immediately, however, we were greeted warmly by Rai’s brother, who told us to make his home our own and led us to one of the detached buildings which had been, apparently, assigned to us for our own use.

In one of the houses, discreetly curtained off with gay hangings, the young girl for whom the ceremony was being held was being adorned for the main event of the day: the ritual of filing down her canine teeth. The reason for this operation was cheerfully given us by Rai: “So she not be like animal.”

When all was ready the maiden—a pretty, frightened-looking girl of seventeen—was borne out on the shoulders of two men, for on this day her feet must never touch the ground. She was clothed in a sarong of green and gold lamé, with a gold scarf bound around her breasts and wearing a tall crown of beaten gold, heavy with ornaments.

In the center of the courtyard was the most gaily decorated pavilion of all and here she was deposited on a raised couch in full view of all the family and guests. Women attendants removed her headdress and helped her to lie down. A priest then took over, intoning prayers and throwing petals of flowers around and over her with a ceremonial gesture. Having induced at least semihypnosis, he began the task of filing down her teeth. Throughout the proceedings, the chants of a dozen handmaidens provided a moaning background, in which the girl herself joined at times as if in fear or pain. Several times she sat up long enough to rinse her mouth and spit into a yellow coconut shell. The business had just enough of a suggestion of the dentist’s chair to lend it a slightly incongruous note.

When all was over, she was again lifted to the shoulders of her bearers and carried, wan and red-eyed, back to the privacy of the dressing room.

“Soon,” Rai promised Jessica, who was visibly upset, “she be more happy, _you_ see. This afternoon, many food—everything play.”

For us, too, there was “many food”: trays heaped high with molded rice, both plain and highly seasoned; a wide variety of curries and condiments; succulent roast pork; sate—bits of spicy meat on thin skewers; bananas, mandarin oranges, and various other dishes that I preferred to eat without identifying.

In the afternoon, as Rai had promised, the girl—now a marriageable young lady—was again carried among us, glowingly triumphant. Dances and a Balinese puppet play were presented for the assembled guests.

Also thanks to Rai—and because it was an auspicious time on the Balinese lunar calendar for ceremonial occasions of any kind—we had the opportunity of viewing a cremation. The remains of a number of deceased persons had been “saved up” for months, waiting until the bereaved families could prepare, and afford, a properly grand celebration. I use the term “celebration” advisedly, for a cremation in Bali, coming many months after the sorrow of death has faded, is not a time of mourning but a joyous release: release of the soul of the departed and, one presumes, release of the family from a heavy burden of obligation.

The procession accompanying the crematory tower itself was long and colorful. It included groups of musicians who played on the melodious Balinese drums, gongs, cymbals, and flutes; men who carried bundles of rice straw and others with cords of firewood; and a lengthy file of women with offerings of all kinds which they bore upon their heads. Everyone, it seemed, contributed food or goods, according to his means or ambition, and everything was to be consumed—by fire.

The main attraction, naturally, was the tall and elaborately decorated cremation tower, which carried the mortal remains of the dozen or so individuals who were being honored. This was borne upon the shoulders of some eighteen or twenty men, who plunged it from one side of the road to the other, splashed it with water from the drainage ditches along the way, or spun it about in erratic, zigzag patterns. This, we were told, was to confuse the spirits of the dead so they could not find their way back to haunt the living.

At the cremation grounds all the carefully wrapped bundles of bones were removed from the tower and placed, each in its own wooden coffin, beneath a long shed. The offerings were piled, as if for lavish display, upon a low platform covered with mats, nearby, and then the whole was set ablaze.

Only one development marred our enjoyment of this happy island. This was an illness which laid Jessica low for several days. On the night after the cremation—which had been a swelteringly hot day filled with excitement and topped off by a meal of strange and exotic foods—Jessica complained that she “didn’t feel good.” I wasn’t too surprised, but we decided to spare her the long bus ride back to Benoa and arranged for Barbara and Jessica to take a room at Minnetta’s hotel for the night.

Gradually Jessica’s vague symptoms seemed to localize in a stiff neck and I set off for Benoa with Ted, sure that all she needed was a good night’s sleep to put her back on her feet.

Early the next morning, however, Barbara turned up at the boat, having left Jessica with her grandmother and caught the first bus from Den Pasar.

“She must be running a high fever,” she told me, with a slightly wild look in her eye. “It was like sleeping with a hot pad, but I didn’t have my thermometer or even aspirin with me!”

She dived below to consult her medical bible, _The Ship’s Medicine Chest at Sea_, which she had not, so far, been called upon to use. Now, however, she was in no way reassured to discover that both polio and meningitis may start with the symptoms of “stiff neck and fever.” Armed with thermometer, textbook, and an overnight case stuffed with every medication she thought she might need, Barbara set off again for the hotel.

By the time she got back Jessica’s fever had turned into a chill and Minnetta, finding no blankets available at the hotel, had commandeered every coat and sweater she could lay hands on and piled them all on top of her shivering charge. Jessica insisted that she had no headache, so Barbara gratefully scratched meningitis as a possibility but the dread of polio still lingered. Rai, as deeply concerned as the family, had been hovering around anxiously and Barbara now dispatched him on his bicycle to look for a qualified physician who could speak English.

Jessica, meanwhile, slept fitfully. Occasionally she woke up to report a new symptom or a change in one of her old ones, whereupon Barbara flew back to her “do-it-yourself” medical text and started her diagnosis all over. The stiff neck turned out to be “more of a sore throat, really” and the “buzzing in the head” was tracked down to a vagrant bluebottle fly.

The climax came when Jessica, her temperature soaring again, began to toss off sweaters and shawls and disclosed a stomach covered with bright red spots! “Sore throat ... fever ... and a rash!” At last Barbara felt that she had it pinned down. “Scarlet fever!”

She began the indicated medication. It was getting dark now, and Jessica, in delirium, began to talk wildly. Barbara’s nerve was just about to break when Rai returned to report that he had “heard of a doctor” who could speak English. The women bundled Jessica up, summoned a doh-ka, and off they started across town, escorted by Rai on his bicycle.

Dr. M. Muhamad Angsar Kartakusuma left his supper to see them. He listened gravely as Barbara outlined the symptoms. Then he took a tongue depressor (the one item Barbara hadn’t thought to bring) and made an easy diagnosis—tonsillitis.

“A shot of penicillin”—he administered it almost before Jessica had time to flinch; “and these pills every four hours”—he handed an envelope to Barbara—“and I think you have nothing more to worry!”

“But—what about the rash?” Barbara protested.

Dr. Kartakusuma examined it briefly. “From heat,” he said, and added a box of medicated powder to relieve the itch.

The charge: nothing!

As Dr. Kartakusuma expressed it, “You are strangers in my country—and in trouble.” He shook hands all around and returned to his supper.

After several days of medication—complicated by the discovery that she had a penicillin allergy—Jessica was recovered enough to pour into her Journal a hundred pages of impressions of Bali, which she has since epitomized in a single word: eerie! The street noises outside her hotel room; a flute and the weird cadence of a gamelin; an old sow who splashed her way up the drainage ditch every morning; the startling cry of a gekko lizard in the night—these apparently had merged in her delirium with distorted memories of ceremonies she had seen, such as the tooth filing and the cremation. Most haunting of all, she and her grandmother had had an experience the rest of us did not share. One night, escorted by a fellow guest at the hotel, they had ridden many miles into the country to witness a kris dance at a village temple. The dancers had gone into trance and ended by plunging the twisted blades of their daggers into their own bodies “right up to the handle!” as Jessica insisted. People near her had fallen to the ground, “invaded by spirits,” and Jessica could actually feel the ground shaking.

As she summed it up, “It was enough to make _anybody_ get tonsillitis—or something!”

We could have spent much longer in Bali, but if we were to get another sampling of Indonesia, the capital, we had to push on. In Jakarta, Marjorie Harris—a childhood friend of Barbara’s—and her husband Mike, of the Ford Foundation, were waiting for us, and Jessica was looking forward to meeting their thirteen-year-old Susan.

Remembering our violently rough entry into Benoa, I put my foot down firmly on Minnetta’s proposal that she return to Jakarta on the _Phoenix_. No matter how indomitable the spirit, the bones of a woman in her seventies are liable to be brittle and the ways of the sea, especially in interisland channels, can be rugged, as we had cause to know. And so, using my authority as captain, I sent her back to Java by plane, to wait for us there.

Actually our passage out through Lombok Strait was gratifyingly easy and, once in the Java Sea, we had fine sailing. Jessica, contentedly convalescent, was busy getting caught up in her Journal or sunning in the cockpit while Ted reeled off fabulous stories on his watch. I, tired for the moment of serious reading, turned to a tale of high adventure at sea. So overloaded was it with drama that I fell to considering the whole difficult problem of trying to communicate a very meaningful experience. How, for instance, could I convey to a reader the wonderful adventure of just _being_ at sea; the thrill I sometimes felt, lying in my bunk and listening to the whisper of water flowing past, in thinking, I’m _doing_ it! I’m actually sailing around the world, just as I planned and dreamed! This is my ship, my life, my adventure, and nobody can take it away from me! Perhaps it is necessary to “juice up” a story, or nobody would ever read it, but although I felt sorry for the hero on the night he _crashed_ into a reef—my _own_ memory of a similar mishap was that it is more like a sickening crunch. And yet, _crash_ or _crunch_, how is it possible to get across a _feeling_ to one who has never been there? More and more I was grateful to Barbara because she had known instinctively that this experience was one that we had to share, since no words of mine could ever have made this vital part of my life real or meaningful to her if she had stayed behind.

That night on watch, still struggling with the problem that confronts any writer, of trying to capture and share an experience through words, I was led to speculate on the subject of sounds at sea. Some are ominous, such as the snap of a jerking anchor chain at an uneasy anchorage or the wind rising and beginning to whistle high in the rigging; others are merely annoying, like the slapping of halyards or the banging of a block on a quiet night, if one is restless. While musing over sounds, it occurred to me that by now I had classified every sound my boat made (I had spent hours tracking down each one in the first months when every noise was a possible harbinger of trouble). At that precise instant, from the darkness of the cabin below, I heard what can only be described as _thump_—pause—_plump_—pause—_plop_—pause—_thud!_ That was a new one! I shone a light below. Nothing. Now I did have something to occupy my mind throughout the rest of my watch.

The next day, during lunch, there was a lull in the conversation. Suddenly Manuia appeared at the porthole. She leaped lightly down to Jessica’s desk—_thump_—then across to the table—_plump_—then down to the plastic-covered couch cushion—_plop_—and finally to the floor—_thud_.

At least one mystery of the sea had been solved!

All along the coast we passed numerous praus. I was always conscious of the possibility of being hijacked by pirates, and whenever one changed course and came over to take a look at us, we mustered all hands—and a couple of rifles—and waved heartily. Invariably, they waved back and shouted cheery greetings and we each went on our way.

A more real danger turned out to be that of running down, at night, an unlighted prau at anchor. On the night of the 29th we had two narrow escapes from such a collision, the second one literally by inches. This shook us quite a bit and I debated following the local example and simply stopping for the night to anchor in the shallow water along the coast. Finally I decided to carry on, stationing a man forward with a searchlight in addition to the man at the helm. Naturally, having made the decision, I began to question my own judgment, with the result that there was still another man on duty for the rest of the night—me!

The next day we were far enough along the coast to hope to reach Jakarta before dark, but the day was misty and, although we were close to shore, it was difficult to tell where the water met the land. We could find nothing that looked like a harbor of the size we knew must be at Jakarta.

At last we spotted a channel through which small-boat traffic was moving toward shore and we worked our way in, sounding as we went. At four fathoms, while still fairly well out, I gave orders to drop the anchor.

“Why we don’t go in until eight feet?” asked one of the crew with sweet reasonableness. “Then anchor?”

Since we draw almost eight feet, that would hardly have left enough margin for error, tide, or rapidly shelving bottom.