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THE
COMMUNITY The capitals of the princes’ districts, the seats of the regencies, are commercialized half-European, half-Chinese towns like Den Pasar and Bulcleng; but the true life of Bali is concentrated in thousands of villages and hamlets. With their thatched roofs lie buried under awnings of tropical vegetation, the groves and gardens that provide for the needs of the villagers. Out of the chartreuse sea of ricefields they surge like dark green islands of tall palms, breadfruit, mango, papaya, and banana trees. Underneath the cool darkness, pierced only by the shafts of sunlight that sift through the mesh of leaves, are the houses hidden from view by interminable mud walls that are broken at regular intervals by long narrow gates. All the gates are alike: two mud supporting a small roof of thick thatch, giving access to each household by a raised doorstep of rough stones. In front of every gate is a stone bridge, or, simpler still, a section of coconut tree trunk to ford the deep irrigation ditch that runs invariably along both sides of the road. A simple village consists of family compounds, each completely surrounded bv walls, lined on each side of a wide wellbuilt avenue that runs in the direction of the cardinal points; from the mountain to the sea, the Balinese equivalent to our “ north “ and “ south.” The villages grew as they spread in these directions, and the Dutch had only to pave the main streets and extend them through the ricefields to obtain the fivehundred-mile net of automobile roads that covers this small island. The Balinese, being still essentially pedestrians, took good care to shade the roads with large trees, and every morning and every evening one sees the people in the streets, men going to work nonchalantly beating rhythms on their agricultural implements, or returning from the fields overloaded with sheaves of rice heavy with grain. Poised women come and go with great loads or shiny black clay pots on their heads. If it happens to be market day in the village, at dawn the roads are crowded with husky people from the near-by villages who come to sell their produce - piles of coconuts, bananas, or vegetables, pottery, mats, baskets, and so forth - carrying on their heads even the table that serves as a stand. If there is a feast in the village temple, the people parade in yellow, green, and magenta silks with fantastic pyramids of fruit and flowers, offerings to the gods, in a pageant that would have made Diaghilev turn green with envy.
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