Atolls of the Sun

by Frederick O'Brien

Llewellyn took up his narration.

“It’s a cursed place,” he assented. “There’s been nothing but death since the white man found out there was anything to steal there. They were the healthiest people in the world, but we whites knew how to destroy them. Our schooner came into the roadstead of Hanga Roa at daybreak. I could see the huge, dead volcano, Rana Roraku, from the masthead. Other extinct volcanos were all over the rolling land. Te Pito te Henua, the old islanders called it; the Navel and the Womb. That monster crater, Rano Raraku, must have given it the latter name, for out of it came all those wonderful images of stone. The Navel was one of many rounded, shallower craters all about. When we landed at sunrise and the slanting rays shone on them they were for all the world like the navels of giants. I fancied each of them belonging to a colossus who had turned to stone. At first, the island was just a gray bulk, the surface in several sweeping curves dotted with mole-hills. As we climbed upon the cliffs and the details of the land grew in the sunlight, the impression was of a totally different part of the globe, of a cut-off place where scenes and people were of an ancient sort, of a mystery that stunned as thoughts crowded in on one. That impression never left me. I can feel it now after these years. The American, Willis, was fair overcome. He turned pale and put his hand to his stomach as if sick.

“‘What’s the matter?’ I asked, though I really knew.

“‘I feel like when I was a little boy and saw the wax-works in New York,’ he said. ‘All the spirits of the dead and great seem to be around. But I’ve waited years to come here.’

“As we walked from point to point that first day, the spectacle was incredible, absolutely bewildering. The whole island was a charnel-house and a relic shrine. It seemed to have been furnished by a race whose mind was fixed on death instead of life, and who worked for remembrance instead of happiness. Oblivion was their most desperate fear, or, at least, they must have thought that the preservation of their bones and the building of images of the dead were the chief duties of the living. At intervals all around the coast were immense platforms or High Places of slabs of stone, gigantic stages for tremendous statues. These bases were called ahu, and were some three or four hundred feet long, and on them at regular intervals had been mammoth sculptures. Scores of these lay half buried in the scrub, and some were covered over entirely by the growth of the grass. Some were fifty or even seventy feet high and others three or four feet, as if the makers sized them by the power or fame of the dead men they represented. They were like gray ghosts of the departed.

“I can’t quite tell you the sensation we had at our first stroll about. Our house was at the base of the volcano, and Timi Linder, who came off to the schooner in a boat to meet us, took us to it. He was a cousin of mine—some of you remember him—and a fine fellow. He didn’t make anything of all those images or the tombs. Sheep were his gods, and we had twenty thousand of them to take care of, besides hundreds of horses and cattle. Our house, Willis’s and mine, was at Mataveri, at the base of the crater Rana Kao, and Timi’s was five miles away at Vaihu. It used to be a Catholic mission. We were soon settled down to a regular routine.

“We were on horseback all day. Some of the going was so bad it meant hours of barely walking the horses. The lower part of the island was all broken sheets of lava, grown over or about with tough grass, and it was worth your neck to travel fast in it. On the slopes of the hills it was smoother, the ash from the volcanos having been leveled more in the thousands of years since the last eruption. Another horrible thing about living there was that we had to get all our water like in these Paumotus by catching rain on our iron roof into tanks. God! How I used to long for a drink out of a Tahiti brook! When we were out in the scrub and noon came it was salvation to find a piece of shade. It was not so terribly hot, because Easter is out of the tropics, and, as I say, the climate is perfectly healthful, but the sun came down like lightning on that lava and the hard grass, and the glare and the heat combined, with the fatigue of the riding, would lay us out. The nights were cool, with heavy dews which supplied the sheep with enough moisture.

“Timi left us much to ourselves and said that he wanted us to go about without any duties and to learn the lay of the land. So we did that. The island was about thirty-four miles around, but it took us many weeks to make the circuit, because we followed the indentations of most of the inlets or bays, determined to see everything of the marvels before we got down to work. Those were the days we suffered from thirst. Except for the lakes in the craters which I’ll tell you about, the so-called puna or springs were far apart, and then only shoal excavations among the boulders into which surface water ran and had been protected by rocky roofs from the sun and animals. Just a few bucketsful in each at a time, and rank it was. The queer thing was the natives drank but little water. They would be surprised every day at our thirst.

“We ascended the crater Rana Kao near our home. It was a quarter of a mile high, and nearly a mile across, a perfect, unbroken circle at its edge except where the lava had cut through and run down to the sea. The inside was magnificent, like a vast colosseum, and, at the bottom, a lake unlike any I had ever seen. Six hundred feet below the rim it was, and more than three hundred feet deep by our soundings, and the sides of the volcano were like a regular cone. We saw many cattle feeding or drinking in the midst of lush vegetation, and on getting close to the lake itself we found that they were standing or walking on a floating garden. So dense and profound was this matting or raft of green and brown, in which were bushes and even small trees, that the cattle moved on it without fear. Yet in places we saw the water rippled by the wind, and at times the cows or bulls drew back from their paths as if they sensed danger. The water was foul with vegetable and animal matter, but probably once this lake had been cared for, and its waters had quenched the thirst of many thousands of people.”

“Ah!” said I, “Llewellyn, I was going to ask you. So far you have been on an uninhabited island. What about the people you found there. I am more interested in them even than in the wonderful images and tombs.”