a sleeping trance, not like the wild and frenzied trance of the sangh-yang, but more like 
a dream. Your antakaransarira, however, has remained awake. Your spirit can perceive 
everything now, unhindered by physical or emotional considerations. You will not be 
concerned by the prospect of hurting yourself. You will not be concerned by anger, or 
love, or resentment. In this state, you will be able to see the dead.'
  Michael raised his hands and examined them, then looked back at the pedanda. 'If I am 
asleep, how can I move?'
  'You forget that your stulasarira and your antakaransarira are inseparable, even after 
death. That is why we cremate our dead, so that the antakaransarira may at last fly free 
from its ashes. Your spirit wishes to move your mortal body and so it has, just as your 
mortal body, when it is awake, can move your spirit.'
  Michael sat silent; the pedanda watched him with a patient smile. Although essentially 
the temple seemed to be the same, now it possessed a curious dreamlike quality, a subdued 
luminosity, and the clouds above the meru towers appeared to be moving at unnatural speed.
  'You have so many questions and yet you cannot ask them,' the pedanda said.
  Michael shook his head. 'I feel that the answers will come by themselves.'
  'Nonetheless, you must try to put into words everything that you fail to understand.'
  'Can I feel pain in this trance?' Michael asked. 'Can I walk on fire, or stab myself 
with knives?'
  'Try for yourself,' smiled the pedanda, and from the folds of his plain white robes he 
produced a wavy-bladed kris, the traditional Balinese dagger. Michael could see by the 
way the blade shone that it had recently been sharpened. He accepted the weapon 
cautiously, testing the weight of its decorative handle. For a moment, as the pedanda 
handed it to him, their eyes met and there was a strange, secretive look in the old man's 
expression that Michael could not remember having noticed before; it was almost a look of 
resignation.
  In the sanghyang trance, young boys seven or eight years old could stab their chests 
with these daggers and the blades would not penetrate their skin. But this was not an 
ordinary sanghyang trance. This was a very different kind of trance, if it was a trance 
at all. The silence in the courtyard was so deep that Michael could almost have believed 
the pedanda had deceived him. He wondered if perhaps in some unknown way he had failed 
his initiation and let the old priest down. Perhaps the only honourable course of action 
left to a student who disappointed the pedanda was suicide, and perhaps this was what he 
was being offered now.
  Michael hesitated, and as he did so, a scraggly looking jungle cock stalked into the 
courtyard, lifted its plumed head and stared at him.
  The pedanda said, 'You are afraid? What are you afraid of? Death?'
  'I'm not sure,' Michael replied uncertainly.
  'To be irresolute is a sin.'
  'I'm afraid but I don't know why. I'm afraid of you.'
  'Of me?' smiled the priest. He lifted his hands, their long, twisty fingernails 
gleaming. 'You have no need to be afraid of me. You have no need to be afraid of 
anything, not even of death. Come, let me show you what death is.'
  Michael glanced down at the kris in his hand. Then he looked back questioningly at the 
pedanda, who shook his head. 'Do not strike now. The question has passed. The question 
will arise again later, never fear, perhaps in a different way.'
  The priest rose to his feet gracefully. For one moment he stood staring at the mask of 
Rangda, with its embroidered covering. Then he turned and glided across the courtyard, 
back through the paduraksa gate, across the outer courtyard and into the street. Michael 
followed him closely, aware of a strange slowness in the way in which his limbs 
responded, as if he were wading through warm and murky water. The streets seemed to be 
deserted except for the cigarette ends that glowed in doorways, the murmur of deep, 
blurry voices and a soft rustling sound that filled the air.
  The pedanda guided him along to the end of the street. Michael felt as if he were 
pursuing a figure in a dream. He was conscious for the first time in over a year that he 
was half-Western, that he was only half-entitled to know the secrets the pedanda was 
revealing to him. Although he had advanced even farther in his spiritual studies than 
most full-blooded Balinese boys, he always felt that he was holding something back, some 
small, sceptical part of his spirit that would always be white.
  Now the pedanda reached a bronze door set into a crumbling stone wall. He opened it and 
Michael followed him through. To his surprise, he found himself in a small cemetery 
thickly overgrown with weeds and garish green moss, curtained with creeper that hung from 
the trees, silent, neglected, its shrines broken and its pathways long choked up, but 
elegant all the same, in the saddest and most regretful of ways. The high wall 
surrounding it must have at one time shielded the graveyard from the sight of every 
building around it, but now the little cemetery was overlooked by three or four office 
blocks and an illuminated sign that read 'Udaya Tours.' In the middle distance, a scarlet 
sign said, 'Qantas.'
  The pedanda stood still. 'I have never shown you this place before,' he said. 'This is 
the graveyard for a hundred and fifty families who died in the puputan, slaughtered by 
the Dutch and by the rajas. Families without names, children without parents. They were 
cremated and so their antakaransariras were freed/, but they have remained here out of 
sorrow.'
  Michael walked slowly between the lines of weed-tangled shrines. The carving on each 
stone was sinuous and curving in the style of Ida Bagus Njana, depicting demons and 
dancers and ghosts and scowling warriors. Each shrine represented one dead family.
  Then he stood still, uncertain of why the pedanda had brought him here. The Qantas sign 
shone brightly: an uncompromising message that the past was long past and that Bali was 
now regularly visited by 747s as well as by demons.
  When Michael turned back to talk to the pedanda, his scalp prickled in shock, for the 
priest was still standing by the cemetery gate, his hands clasped, his head slightly 
raised, but right behind Michael a family had gathered in complete silence. A father, a 
mother, two grown-up daughters and a young son, no more than eight years old. They wore 
traditional grave clothes and their heads were bound with white scarves. All were staring 
at him, not moving, and although he could see them quite distinctly, they seemed to have 
no more reality than the evening air. He stared back at them. He knew without a doubt 
that they were dead.
  Slowly the family turned and walked away between the shrines, fading from sight as they 
passed the pedanda.
  Then, as he looked around, Michael saw other figures standing equally silent among the 
creepers: a pale-faced young girl, her black hair fastened with gilded combs; a man who 
kept his hands clasped over his face; an old woman who kept raising her hand as if she 
were waving to somebody miles and miles away; children with frightened faces and eye 
sockets as dark as ink.
  The pedanda came through the graveyard and stood close to Michael, still smiling. 'All 
these people have been dead for many years. They still remain, however, and they always 
shall. We refuse to accept the presence of spirits only because we cannot see them except 
in trances.'
  'Will they speak?' Michael asked. In spite of the humidity, he felt intensely cold and 
he was shivering.