THE ANCIENT SURVIVAL: THE BALI AGA

The village of Tenganan owns communally enormous tracts of fertile and well-cultivated lands that fill every need of the village and make it one of the richest in the Island. I-Tanggu told me this legend of how the land came to belong to the village:

Hundreds of years ago, long before the Hindu-Javanese set -d in Bali, the powerful king Bedaulu lost his favourite horse. Broken-hearted, the king sent the men of whole villages in all directions with orders to find the stray horse. The Tenganans went eastward 2 until, after days of travel, they found the corpse of the horse. The king asked them to name their reward, but their spokesman said they wanted only the land where the horse was found; that is, the area covered by the smell of the carcass.

Although the horse had been dead for many days under the tropical sun, Bedaulu considered this a modest request and sent ,an official with a delicate sense of smell to measure off the land, starting from the place where the horse lay. Accompanied by the chief of Tenganan, he walked for days, but no matter how far the two went, the smell seemed to follow them. Finally the ofricial was exhausted and could go no farther; he said he considered the land already covered enough, and the Tenganans were satisfied. When the official left, the chief pulled from under his clothes a large piece of the rotten flesh of the horse.

Tanggu told me the story as we went up to the top of a hill to look at one of the remains of the famous horse; the penis, " which had turned to stone." On the summit, under a large tree, was the relic, a long river stone shaped like a phallus by the action of water. Passing people had left offerings on top of it. I-Tanggu also said that the people of Tenganan are not permitted to work their vast lands with their own hands, but hire other Balinese to do the agricultural work for them.

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