What Indonesia - Bali is all about ?

A great procession streams round and round once more. This time a number of women, chiefly old and very skinny, dressed in white, dance vaguely with tragic faces, linked together by an endless length of checked cloth which passes over their shoulders and is carried, wound in a thick roll, by a man behind them. The weapons are borne round. As they pass the group of the elders at the top of the steps, each man in turn stops and addresses them, and passes briefly into trance, krissing himself. They watch, remote and unmoved, except that the muscles of their face tremble slightly. A strange-looking man, curiously like an. Indian ascetic, and the Guardian with the sword go into occasional ecstasies.

There is a huge press in the crowd, an impression of old Women's puckered faces, of recurring ecstasies, of drums and cymbals, of waves of intense emotion. one has the feeling all the time of some great and ancient tragedy which is being commemorated, the significance of which is entirely lost but not the emotion connected with it, which is sacramentally evoked whenever the rite is enacted. The great blood sacrifice of the cockfight is of course in some way intimately associated with it.

Now back to the inner court. The masks are again in their baskets. Old and young women, about twenty in a group, wind slowly forward in a Redjang, with beautifully curving arms, while the ancients behind them tremble and weep. An old priest leads, the emerald priestess up on to the high bale where the women sit fanning.

Now the oldest women take up the Wjang, and wind forward, ten in all. When they reach a certain point in the temple court they suddenly break off their dance and go and kneel in a group. The Guardian, who just before the Redjang was shaking and laughing, now stands again impassive, with a purple bow drooping over his ear, and beside him the curious ardent man (Indian ascetic), in striped black and white sapoet, with long black tapering beard.

Two men with entranced faces dance weirdly forward, mount the bale and begin an orgy of krissing on the steps, while the Guardian stands impassive with empty gazing eyes.

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