Issue 21 · 8 October 2026

Demons Travel In Straight Lines

Four words that beat every argument I have ever made.

Demons travel in straight lines. They might be the only thing in Bali that does.

Because of this, inside every Balinese house gate there is a short wall with nothing behind it. It is called the aling-aling. It stands square to the doors, head high and a little wider than the opening, so the moment you are through you have to go left or right. From the street you see the wall, sometimes with a Ganesh looking back at you from it, draped in flowers, and you cannot see the house. You cannot see who is home, or what they are doing, or whether the washing is out. The old texts size all of it off the body of the person who lives there: the gate the width of a man with his hands on his hips, the wall seven of his foot-widths inside. A demon arrives at the gate, meets the wall, and goes off to bother someone else.

A carved stone aling-aling wall in a Balinese garden, with a seated figure in a niche and offerings at its foot — An aling-aling, Bali. A niche, an offering, and nothing behind it. Photo: Ronan O'Connell, Atlas Obscura.

What I like about this is that nobody argues with a demon. Try explaining to anyone why a front door should not look straight at the sofa. You will find yourself talking about privacy, and arrival, and the pace at which a house should reveal itself, and somewhere around the third sentence they will have stopped listening. “Demons cannot turn corners” is four words, and it has held for longer than any argument I could make. The wall gets built, and carved, and given a Ganesh to look after it.

Sketch of a Balinese gate with a demon stopped by the short wall just inside it — A demon, a wall, and no further discussion.

Then the car arrived. A gate you can drive through is three or four times that width, which leaves no room for a wall behind it, and the aling-aling disappeared from a lot of ordinary houses. The demons did not. They got a driveway.

Rendering of a gate with timber doors and a stacked stone roof, a woman stepping down into the garden towards a wall — The gate, as drawn so far.

I am drawing a gate at the moment. Two timber leaves, a roof of stacked stone, steps down into the garden. There is a wall on the drawing, a metre inside the bottom step so that you land before you turn. The client is not Balinese and nobody asked for it. When I first came here I would have left it out, or kept it as decoration. Now it is the best idea on the sheet, and it is not even mine.

Sketch looking from the street through an open front door, straight down a hallway to a person on a sofa — The test, from the pavement.

You do not need to believe in demons to run the test. Open your front door, walk out to the street, and look back in. Whatever a stranger can see from there is what the wall is for. Reply and tell me what it is.

Danny
a tropical architect

P.S. If this one made you want to go back, start with Take Off Your Shoes, which is the last time I wrote about what happens at a door.