Story of Bali, Indonesia

We stood silently watching this magic display. The lights glowed and died, came close together, spread rapidly out in a long line. Slowly they floated back once more to where I had first seen them. One by one they went out, until only a single light remained. But all at once it was gone. They valley was in darkness.

All the next day I was haunted by the weird beauty of the scene I had witnessed the night before. It was as if the stars had descended. if it had not been for Durus and Sampil, I should have been unable to believe it had not been part of a dream. But when I mentioned it to Cokorda Rai, and later to the perbekel in Pliatan, they were not surprised. Had I awoke out of an uneasy sleep? With a feeling of suffocation? There was only one explanation. Sorcery was in the air once more. It had only begun, and no one knew what was to follow.

No one was surprised, then, when all at once things began to go wrong in the house. Misfortunes occurred, one after another, and as they accumulated everyone began to have a worried, hunted look. Rantun the cook slipped on the kitchen floor and broke her arm. Pugig stepped on a thumbtack and got an infected kiol. The cat fell off the roof, actually fell, and for no reason at all, and was killed, while Kesyur and Sampih declared the garage was haunted. Night after night they would wake, they said, unaccountably rigid, jaws clenched, unable to make a sound. They heard the bicycle bells of Durus and Pugig ring out in the darkness, although there was no one else with them in the garage. Voices called their names from outside, but they opened the doors to find no one. And late one night, as Kesyur walked up the- road alone to the garage, he saw, sitting silently among the bamboos, a great bird large as a horse....

In the morning, as Pugig brought up the coffee, he would point to drops of blood that ran in an unbroken line all around the outside floor of the sleeping-house. A fight between two tokes the great lizards that now hid and croaked in the thatch, I suggested. but Pugig did not agree, for he would wash the spots away, only to find them again the following morning. One night I awoke to hear the loud ticking of a clock almost in my ear. It was rapid and metallic, like an alarm clock, and seemed to come from outside the wall. As I reached for my flashlight it began to travel quickly around the four walls of the room. I ran outside, but there was no trace of anything at all.

Everyone agreed, as related the experience in the morning, that all this was the work- of leaks.

These are excellent examples of how Westerners and Balinese see and interpret phenomena differently because of their different belief systems. The Westerner was startled and puzzled by what he saw. The Balinese accepted the events as commonplace because they were readily understandable to his mind.

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