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by my amateur movie camera. The Balinese, with the natural love of ostentation and display which is inherent in every native breast, actually doted on the impression they were making upon the white man. And they figured— not incorrectly — that the box in my hand was just another admiring eye. So they preened themselves and posed for me. The Tower of the Dead was dragged up and down the road before my lens in order to enable me to photograph it from every possible angle. They gave me time to run ahead of them down the road and catch a "shot" of them as they came prancing toward me.
And when the funeral pyre at last was reached, the priest himself invited me to sit upon the altar steps and from that spot of vantage I photographed the ceremony.
Long lines of girls and women came bearing vessels of holy water upon their heads, or urns containing the sacred fire. The men at last set down the gilded Tower and rushed to the nearest stream to wash their sweating naked bodies and cleanse themselves from the contamination of death.
Copyright by Myron Zobel
A Cock-fight in Bali
THE bodies were now handed down from the tower and carefully washed in holy water by the priest and sprinkled with flowers. I feared to look upon the ghastly remains but forced myself to do so. Nothing at all was visible but crumbled bones. For the bodies had been dead for months — saved up until a propitious day for burning and until a time when sufficient dead should have accumulated to jointly bear the high cost of cremations.
Copyright by Myron Zobel
Five Dead Men Make Finish"
At last after long and mystic blessings by the priest, the holy fire was touched to the little structure that bore the bodies. So dramatic had the spectacle now become and so intense was my desire to film every bit of it that I leaned too far out of my precarious scaffold and plunged headlong to the ground. I was saved from injury, and my camera and film from destruction, by the prompt action of the natives below the altar who rushed forward and caught me — just in the nick of time.
It was growing dark and only the flames which now lapped eagerly up the tower and along the little funeral pyre that bore the bodies enabled me, in the failing light, to record the final passage of the cremation.
But eventually the last spurt of fire flashed heavenward and the flimsy structure of paper and bamboo crashed crackling to the ground.
Tired and dirty, with torn clothes and bruised body, I sank back into the seat of the automobile.
The family and friends of the deceased would wait all night about the smouldering fires so that the last ashes of their beloved could be scattered next morning on the waters of the nearby stream.
(Continued on page 28)
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