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In the fishing village of Lanleki on the island of Alor, I met an old man who had seen a dragon. His name was Achmad. Sitting in the narrow front room of his small house, he told me his story. Forty years ago, long before he made the hajj pilgrimage to Mecca, he was walking along a narrow path that leads to the village when the dragon emerged from the sea and chased him through the trees. It had horns like a buffalo and seven flickering tongues.

The most easterly landfall in the island chain that stretches east of Java, Alor is a place of pale beaches and dark, myth-filled hills. Like many other regions of Indonesia, the island has undergone remarkable changes in the last century. In 1938, American anthropologist Cora Du Bois visited Alor and records she kept describe an island where people knew little of money and spoke no Indonesian. Though there was a long established halo of Islam around the coast, Protestant missionaries had little success spreading their religion in the hills and most people worshiped only the spirits of the countryside. Dutch colonialists claimed to have pacified the island at the turn of the 20th century, but clan warfare and headhunting were still practiced.

Seventy years later, roads have snaked into the hills, whitewashed churches have sprouted in remote villages and most of the population has become nominally Christian. The island’s capital, Kalabahi, has filled with buzzing motorbikes. There are daily flights from Kupang and even a nascent tourist industry.

But, as I was to discover, Alor, part of East Nusa Tenggara province, is still a place where old beliefs and traditions hold strong, and where there is little distinction between history and myth. This is an island that could still be marked on the map with the words: Here be dragons...

Alor is smaller than Bali and has a population of just 168,000. But it is perhaps the most linguistically diverse place in Indonesia; as many as 17 languages and numerous dialects are spoken here. There is a similar diversity of culture, with the creation myths of one village often meaning nothing to the people of the next. But there are certain threads that run throughout the island. Dragons, for one, are a part of the folklore one hears from village to village. Only here they are spoken of not as mythological creatures, but as real entities.

If I wanted to learn more about dragons, Achmad said, I should go to the village of Alor Kecil. A Muslim village with concrete houses and tin-roofed mosques shaded by huge banyan trees, Alor Kecil lies at the western tip of the rugged peninsula that bulges to the north of Kalabahi Bay. As I picked my way through the village I spotted dragon figures everywhere. There were dragons carved into door frames, dragons woven into pieces of local ikat cloth and dragon statues outside the community hall.

Sitting outside the lineage house of the Suku Bao Raja, Alor Kecil’s royal clan, I met a young man named Jason. I asked him about dragons. The naga, or dragon, he said, was the protector of the village. It had come originally from the ground in the hills to the north, but today it lived in the sea. I repeated Achmad’s story and Jason was not surprised.

“People do see the dragon, but not often. It’s usually outsiders who see it, not locals,” he said.

He told me that all of the people of Alor Kecil and the surrounding settlements were descended from a man who rose from the earth in a place called Bampalola in the hills above the coast. Following his directions I traveled up a steep track that wound between the ridges.

Bampalola is a modern village with a school and a mosque. One kilometer downhill through the maize fields, on a high promontory at the end of a razor-sharp ridge, stood the old village, Lakatuli. No one lived in Lakatuil now, but the place was still used for traditional ceremonies. Tall thatched roofs rose above bamboo-floored platforms. Elaborate carvings on beams and banisters were picked out in white and ochre, and dragons were chiseled into the woodwork.

Looking at them I was reminded of a grainy black-and-white photo in Du Bois’s 1944 book, “The People of Alor.” It was a picture of an ulenai, a carving representing the village guardian spirit. Though the ulenai lacked the stylistic touches clearly borrowed from Chinese art that I had seen on carvings in Alor Kecil and Bampalola, it was very obviously a dragon.

Du Bois had written of ancestor myths and guardian spirits. “This whole concept will undoubtedly become the center of revivalistic cults when Alorese culture crumbles, as it inevitably will under the impact of foreign colonization,” Du Bois wrote. But much of the island’s ancient traditions appeared intact and it seemed the people’s belief in the dragon as a powerful protector had never faded from village life here.

From Bampalola I returned to the coast and the hamlet of Alu Kai, just east of Alor Kecil. In the front room of a clan house with a carved dragon in the corner, two of the village elders, Pak Amir and Pak Mo, told me more about dragons, referring to their stories as “history” rather than legend. They made no distinction between the dragon tales and the stories of the arrival of Islam from Ambon and Makassar.

The dragon first appeared from the earth in Bampalola many centuries ago, before the birth of mankind, they said. The first man rose in the same place later and his descendants traveled downhill to the shore where the founder of Alu Kai hamlet, Jai Manu, married a princess of the mysterious Sea People named Eko Sari. While they talked, children gathered in the doorway, just as they had done in Lanleki. Pak Amir smiled.

“It’s important for old men to talk; if the old men just keep silent then how will the children know their own history?” he said.

There was one more place to visit in my pursuit of Alor’s dragons. I’d heard that at the tip of the headland beyond Alor Kecil was a shrine dedicated to the dragon. I picked my way through stony fields and thorny scrub. Insects buzzed in the undergrowth and I could hear the sea, hissing onto the rocks nearby. I met a tall, barefoot man named Haider who led me to the shrine.

It was a small structure, a low tin roof sheltering two shelves painted with long, black dragons, and on the top level a heavier, cruder dragon carving. Old coconut husks were scattered on the ground. A bunch of dried goats’ ears hung on a rusty nail. It felt like a place of dark magic. People often come here to make offerings to the dragon, Haider said. Chickens and goats are routinely tossed into the sea as offerings, not just by local villagers, but also police chiefs and politicians from Kalabahi seeking the protection of the mysterious beast, he said. The dried carcass of a chicken hung from a branch. It was a strange, faintly unsettling place. As the afternoon sun slanted away over the hills of Pantar, I peered down into the water, half-expecting to see a horned, seven-tongued serpent rise from the depths.