Atolls of the Sun

by Frederick O'Brien

“Every single atom, from the least particle to the largest fragment of rock, in this great pile,” said Darwin, “bears the stamp of having been subjected to organized arrangement. We feel surprised when travelers tell us of the vast dimensions of the Pyramids and other great ruins, but how utterly insignificant are the greatest of these when compared to these mountains of stone accumulated by the agency of various minute and tender animals. This is a wonder which does not at first strike the eye of the body, but, after reflection, the eye of reason.”

I sat down under a dwarf cocoanut and let my eyes and mind dwell upon the gorgeousness of the prospect and the insight into nature’s reticences it afforded. Everywhere were the tombs or skeletons of the myriad creatures who had labored and died to construct these footstools of Might. Could man assume that these eons of years and countless births, efforts, and deaths, were for any concern of his? But else, he asked, why were they? To show the boundless power and caprice of the Creator? Was not the world made for humanity?

An atoll was to an island as a comet to a star—a freak or sport in the garden of the sea-gods. It was as if the Designer had planned to set up, in the thousand miles of ocean through which the Dangerous Islands stretched, a whimsical cluster of shallower salt lakes, and so had hidden trillions of tiny beings to inclose them. For, after all, an atoll was but a lagoon surrounded by a reef of coral, or rather two reefs, for in the plan of the Architect there was built a second reef for every atoll, and this outer barrier was sunken, as the one through which we had come, but yet took the brunt of the waves, and prevented them from washing away and destroying the inner and habitable reef on which I then sat.

This hidden shoal belted the beach regularly, so that it made a moat between the two; and yet in most atolls there was such an opening as that through which we had come, often a mere depression, sometimes a deep and wide mouth. One was forced to consider whether the Architect had not taken man into his scheme, for without such an opening no people could reach the shore and lagoon. But the grievous fact was that in some atolls the minute workers had left no door and that man himself had torn one open with tools and explosives. Even once within the moat, our boat was in comparative safety only in the mildest weather, for the moat was studded with lumps and boulders of coral, and the most crafty guardianship was imperative to keep our craft whole.

If there had been an entry through the inner shore into the peaceful lagoon by which I lolled, then would anchorage and calm have been assured. So, of course, nature had in some other atolls than Niau attended to this detail, and these I was to find more inhabited and more developed, for in some even schooners might seek the haven of the lake, and a fleet lie there in security. The lagoons were thus, generally, safe and unflurried, though sometimes terribly harried by cyclones, such as Lying Bill described the Dane as riding from sea to sea across the entire island of Anaa.

Each of the Paumotus was made up of a number of motus, or islets, parted by lower strata in which was the moat water. This string of motus assumed many dissimilar figures. One had fifty pieces in its puzzle—a puzzle not fully solved by science, or, at least, still in dispute. The motus were all formed of coral rock of comparatively recent origin geologically. Were these atolls the mountain-tops of a lost Atlantis or thrust-up marine plateaus? The wise men differed. A theory was that the atolls were coral formations upon volcanic islands that had slowly sunk, each a monument marking an engulfed island or mountain peak.

Another, that volcanic activity, which mothered the high islands in these seas, caused to rise from the bottom of the ocean a series of submerged tablelands, leveled by the currents and waves, on which the coral insects erected the reefs—reefs just peeping above the surface of the water—and on which the storms threw great blocks of madrepores and coral broken from the mass. When in this condition, mere rocky rings of milky coral, over which each billow swept, without life or aught else than the structures of the marvelous zoöphytes, floors cut and broken here and there by the surging and pounding breakers, the hand of the Master raised them up, as through Polynesia other islands had been raised, and fixed these Paumotus as the fairest growths of Neptune’s park.

Lifted above the watery level, they were able to begin their task of usefulness. Seeds carried by currents, borne by the winds, or brought by those greatest of all pioneers and settlers of new countries, the sea-birds, were flung on these ready, but yet barren, atolls, and vegetation gave them an entrancing present.

Volcano and insect combined to make these coral blossoms of the South Seas so different from any other mundane formations that the man with any dreaming in his soul stood awe-struck at the wonder and artistry of nature. They were the most wonderful and simple of nature’s works. They eluded portrayal by brush and camera. No canvas or film could grasp their symmetry and grace, seize more than a fragment of their alluring form or hint of their admirable colors. Ravishing scenes from the deck of a ship, and marvels of construction and hue when upon them, they were sad and disappointing to the dweller, like a lovely woman who has a bad disposition.

Circles, ovals, and horseshoes, regular and irregular, a few miles or a hundred in circumference, the Paumotus were always essentially the same—the lagoon and the fringe of reef and palm. These Iles Dangereuses were the supreme in creation in harmonious light and shade. They were the very breath of imagination. My thoughts harked back to the dawn of life, and the struggle between the land and water in which continents and islands were drowned, and others rose to be the home of beast and man, when God said, “Let the dry land appear.”