dels who
for a consideration will pose in the nude, but when the picture is
completed she promptly resumes the shapeless and hideous garments of
Mother Hubbard cut which the missionaries were guilty of introducing
and whose all-enveloping folds, they naively believe, form a shield and
a buckler against temptations of the flesh. But there are no
missionaries in Bali, not one--though the Board of Foreign Missions may
interest itself in the islanders after this book appears--and the women
continue to dress as they should with such figures and in such a
climate.

Because of a flat tire, the driver stopped the car beside a little
stream in which two extremely pretty girls were bathing. With the
evening sun glinting on their brown bodies and their piquant, oval
faces framed by the dusky torrents of their loosened hair, they looked
like those bronze maidens which disport themselves in the fountain of
the Piazza delle Terme in Rome, come to life. I felt certain that they
would take to flight when Hawkinson unlimbered his motion-picture
camera and trained it upon them, but they continued their joyous
splashing without the slightest trace of self-consciousness or
confusion. In fact, when a Balinese girl becomes embarrassed, she does
not betray it by covering her body but by drawing over her face a veil
which looks like a piece of black fishnet. Their bath completed, the
maidens emerged from the water on to the farther bank, paused for a
moment to arrange their hair, like wood nymphs of the Golden Age, then
wound their gorgeous _kains_ about them and vanished amid the trees.
From somewhere on the distant hillside came the sweet, shrill quaver of
a reed instrument. The driver said it was a native flute, but I knew
better. It was the pipes of Pan....

* * * * *

Rather than that you should be scandalized when you visit Bali, let me
make it quite clear that in matters of morality the Balinese women are
as easy as an old shoe. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that
they are unmoral rather than immoral. This is one of the conditions of
life in the Insulinde which must be accepted by the traveler, just as
he accepts as a matter of course the heat and the insects and the dirt.
Though polygamy is practised, it is confined, because of the expense
involved in maintaining a matrimonial stable, to the wealthier chiefs
and other men of means. A Turkish pasha who maintained a large harem
once told me th