ming and ask him to arrange
some native dances for you. He's very keen about that sort of thing and
knows where to get the best dancers in the island."

"Tell me," I queried, as I was about to enter the car, "are these girls
I've heard so much about really pretty?"

The Resident smiled cynically.

"Well," he replied, and I thought that I could detect a note of
homesickness in his voice, "it depends upon the point of view. When you
first arrive in Bali you swear that they are the prettiest
brown-skinned women in the world. But after you have been here a year
or so you get so tired of everything connected with the tropics that
you don't give the best of them a second glance. For my part, give me a
plain, wholesome-looking Dutch girl with a lusty figure and
corn-colored hair and cheeks like apples in preference to all the
cafe-au-lait beauties in Bali."

"Au revoir," I called, as I signaled to the driver and the car leaped
forward. "If I listen to you any longer I shall have no illusions
left."

* * * * *

Save only its western end, which is covered with dense jungle inhabited
by tigers and boa-constrictors, Bali is a vast garden, ablaze with the
most gorgeous flowers that you can imagine and criss-crossed by a
net-work of hard, white roads which alternately wind through huge
cocoanut plantations or skirt interminable paddy fields. From the coast
the ground rises steadily to a ridge formed by a central range of
mountains, which culminate in the imposing, cloud-wreathed Peak of
Bali, two miles high. Streams rushing down from the mountains have cut
the rich brown loam of the lowlands into deep ravines, down which the
brawling torrents make their way to the sea between high banks
smothered in tropical vegetation. The most remarkable feature of the
landscape, however, are the rice terraces, built by hand at an
incredible cost of time and labor, which climb the slopes of the
mountains, tier on tier, like the seats in a Roman ampitheatre,
sometimes to a height of three thousand feet or more, constituting one
of the engineering marvels of the world.

The southern slope of the divide appeared to be much more thickly
peopled than the northern, for, as we sped down the steep grades with
brakes a-squeal, villages of mud-walled, straw-thatched huts became
increasingly frequent, nor did the natives appear to be observing
Menjepee as strictly as in the vicinity of Boeleleng, for they stood in
the