Bali Island
MALAY
Archipelago lies directly on the volcanic belt of the world. Like
the backbone of some restless, formidable antediluvian monster,
more than three hundred volcanoes rise from The sea in a great
chain of islands - perhaps all that remains of A continent broken
up in prehistoric cataclysms - forming a continuous land bridge
that links Asia with Australia. Because of its peculiar and fantastic
nature, its complex variety of peoples, and its fabulous richness,
the archipelago is one of the most fascinating regions of the
earth. It includes famous islands like Java, Borneo, Sumatra,
New Guinea, the Philippines, and the hysterical. Island-volcano
of Krakatao. Such freaks of nature as the giant " dragon
" lizards of Komodo, the coloured lakes of Flores, the orangutans,
the rafflesia (a flower over three feet in diameter), and the
birds of paradise, are to be found nowhere else, The population
of the islands ranges from such forms of primitive humanity as
the Negritos, the Papuans, the Kubus, who seem only a few steps
away in the evolutionary scale from the orangutan, to the super
civilized Hindu-Javanese, who over six hundred years ago built
monuments like Borobudur and Prambanan, jewels of Eastern art.
Through the centuries, civilization
upon civilization from all directions has settled on the islands
over the ancient megalithic cultures of the aborigines, until
each island has developed an individual character, with a colorful
culture, according to whether Chinese, Hindu, Malay, Polynesian,
Mohammedan, or European influence has prevailed. Despite the mental
isolation these differences have created, even the natives believe
that the islands once formed a unified land. Raffles, in his History
of lava, mentions a Javanese legend that says, " the continent
was split into nine parts, but when three thousand rainy seasons
will have elapsed, the Eastern Islands shall again be reunited
and the power of the white man shall end."
One of the smallest, but
perhaps the most extraordinary, of the islands, is the recently
famous Bali - a cluster of high volcanoes, their craters studded
with serene lakes set in dark forests filled with screaming monkeys.
The long green slopes of the volcanoes, deeply furrowed by ravines
washed out by rushing rivers full of rapids and waterfalls, drop
steadily to the sea without forming lowlands. just eight degrees
south of the Equator, Bali has over two thousand square miles
of extravagantly fertile lands, most of which are beautifully
cultivated. Only a narrow strait, hardly two miles across, separates
Bali from Java; here again the idea that the two islands were
once joined and then separated is sustained by the legend of the
great Javanese king who was obliged to banish his good-for-nothing
son to Bali, then united to Java by a very narrow isthmus. The
king accompanied his son to the narrowest point of the tongue
of land; when the young prince had disappeared from sight, to
further emphasize the separation, he drew a line with his finger
across the sands. The waters met and Bali became an island.
The dangers lurking in the
waters around the island suggest a possible reason why Bali remained
obscure and unconquered until 1908. Besides the strong tidal currents
and the great depths of the straits, the coasts are little indented
and are constantly exposed to the full force of the monsoons;
where they are not bordered by dangerous coral banks, they rise
from the sea in steep cliffs. Anchorage is thus out of the question
except far out to sea, and the Dutch have bad to build an artificial
port in Benoa to afford a berth for small vessels.
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