Atolls of the Sun

by Frederick O'Brien

“She was dressed all in white, with a blue sash, and a blue ribbon in her hair, and when she sang I could see her white bosom as it rose and fell. She was making love to the American right before me. Her father, with the tablet beside him, thought of nothing but the translation, and she had forgotten me. I could see that this was one of many such evenings. Willis stood and turned the leaves on which she had written her words and air, and when she sang the word ‘love’ their bodies seemed to draw each other. There was a girl I knew in Munich—but hell! After the tablets were put away, we talked about the yearly festival of the god Meke Meke, which was about the last of the ancient days still celebrated. The schooner was due back, and would take away the visitors, and they hoped that it would not go before thirty days yet, when it would be Maro, the last month in the Rapa Nui year, our July. That was the real winter month, and then the sea-birds came by the tens of thousands to lay their eggs. Mostly they preferred the ledges and hollows of the cliffs, but the first comers frequented two islets or points of rock in the sea just below the crater Rano Kao. Both Chief Ure Vaeiko and the old Pakomeo said that always there had been a ceremony to the god Meke Meke at that time. We had witnessed the one the previous year, and could tell the English pair about it.

“All the strong men of the island, young and old, met at Orongo after the birds were seen to have returned, and raced by land and water to the rocks, Motu Iti and Motu Nui, to seize an egg. The one who came back to the king and crowd at Orongo was highly honored. The great spirit of the sea, Meke Meke, was supposed to have picked him out for regard, and all the year he was well fed and looked after by those who wanted the favor of the god. The women especially were drawn to him as a hero, and a likely father of strong children. In times gone, said Ure Vaeiko, many were killed or hurt in the scramble of thousands, and in the fights for precedence that came in the struggle to break the eggs of competitors. Now one or two might be drowned or injured, but, with the few left to take part, often no harm was done anybody.

“When I left that night Willis walked a little distance with me as I led my horse. He was under stress and, after fencing about a bit, said that he would like to go away on the schooner. His two years were not complete, but he was anxious to get back to America. He had gathered material for a thesis on the tablets and sculptures of Rapa Nui, with which he believed he could win his doctor’s degree. That was really what he had come for, he said. I was sore because I knew the truth. I didn’t doubt about the thesis. That explained his being there at all, but his wanting to go on that next vessel was too plain. I said to him that he was not a prisoner or a slave, but that I hoped he would stay, unless Timi Linder was aboard, when it would be all right, as only two white men were needed, one at each station. We left it that way, though he did not say yes or no.

“Well, Linder was on the schooner, and she came into Hanga Piko Cove two weeks before the Meke Meke feast, so that her sailing was set for the day after, and Willis was told by Linder it was all right for him to go. Linder had letters for everybody, and new photographic films for Willis. I unloaded the vessel, and Willis rode over the island with Linder to show him the changes, the increase of cattle and sheep, and pick out certain cattle and horses the schooner was to carry to Tahiti. He made dozens of pictures for his thesis. Meanwhile the natives had absolutely quit all work and moved in a body from their little plantations to the old settlement at Orongo to prepare for the race. Orongo was the queerest place in the world. If Rapa Nui was strange, then Orongo was the innermost secret of it. It was a village of stone houses in two rough rows, built on the edge of the volcano Rana Kao, and facing the sea. There were fifty houses, all pretty much alike. They were built against the terraces and rocks of the crater slope, without design, but according to the ground. The doorways to the houses were not two feet wide or high, and the rooms, though from a dozen to forty feet long, never more than five feet wide, and the roofs not more than that high. They were built of slabs of stone, and the floors were the bare earth. The doorposts were sculptured and the inside walls painted, and the rocks all about marked with hieroglyphics and figures. There were lizards, fishes, and turtles, and a half-human, mythical beast with claws for legs and arms, but mostly the Meke Meke, the god which Professor Dorey had discovered the likeness of in the Inca tombs in Peru. The old people said that Orongo had never been occupied except at the time of the feast of Meke Meke.

“So there they were, all that were left of the once many thousands, living again in those damp, squat tombs, and cooking in the ovens by the doorways that were there before Judas hanged himself. All knew that Orongo was more ancient than the platforms or the images, and those were built by the same folk who put up the stonehenges in Britain and in the Tonga Islands. Pakomeo, who had escaped from the slavery in Peru, was in charge of the Meke Meke event, because Chief Ure Vaeiko was in his eighties. We donated a number of sheep, and, with yams, bananas, and sugar-cane,—we grew a little of these last two,—the show was mostly of food. A few went to Orongo several days before the bird-eggs trial, but all slept there the night before. The moon was at its biggest, and the women danced on the terrace in front of the houses. Professor Dorey and his daughter with Willis were there when Timi Linder and I arrived after supper. They had waited for us, to begin, and the drums were sounding as we rounded the curve of the crater.

“The English girl was entranced by the beauty of the night, the weird outlines of the Orongo camp, the over-reaching rise of the volcano, the sea in the foreground, and the kokore toru, the moon that shone so brightly on that lone speck of land thousands of miles from our homes. I heard her singing intimately to him an old English air. The schooner was to leave the next day, and her lover would go with her.

“When we were seated on mats, Pakomeo struck his hands together, and called out, ‘Riva-riva maitai!’ Two women danced, both so covered with mat garments and wearing feather hats drooping over their heads that I did not know them. The tom-tom players chanted about the Meke Meke, and the women moved about the circle, spreading and closing their mats in imitation perhaps of the Meke Meke’s actions in the sea or air. I was bored after a few minutes, and watched Willis and Miss Dorey. They were in the shadow sitting close to each other, their hands clasped, and from his sweet words to her I learned her first name. The father always said simply ‘daughter,’ but Willis called her Viola. It was a good name for her, it seemed to me, for she was grave and pathetic like the viola’s notes. The two women were succeeded by others, who put in pantomine the past of their people, the building of the ahu and the images, the fishing and the wars, the heroic feats of the dead, and the vengeance of the gods. Christianity had not touched them much. They still believed in the atua, their name for both god and devil.

“Now the heaps of small fuel brought days before by severe labor were lit, and when the fires were blazing low a single dancer appeared. She had on a white tapa cloak, flowing and graceful, and in her hair the plumage of the makohe, the tropic bird, the long scarlet feathers so prized by natives. As she came into the light I saw that she was Taaroa. Her long black hair was in two plaits, and the makohe feathers were like a coronet. She had a dancing-wand in each hand, the ao, light and with flattened ends carved with the heads of famous female dancers of long ago. The three drums began a slow, monotonous thump, and Taaroa a gentle, swaying movement, with timid gestures, and coquettish glances—the wooing of a maiden yet unskilled in love. The drums beat faster, and the simulated passion of the dancer became more ardent. Her eyes, dark-brown, brilliant, and liquid, commenced to search for the wooed one, and roved around the circle. They remained fixed an instant on the American in startling appeal. I glanced and saw Miss Dorey look at him surprisedly and inquiringly, and then resentfully at Taaroa. But she was carrying on her pantomine, and she ended it with a burst of passion, the hula that we all know, though even more attractive than Miri’s or Mamoe’s in Tahiti.

“I suppose Miss Dorey had never in her life seen such an expression of amour, and didn’t know that women told such things. Her face was like the fire, and she moved slightly away from Willis. But now Taaroa was dancing again, and altogether differently. She stood in one spot, and as the drums beat softly, raised her arms as if imploring the moon, and sang the mourning ute of Easter Island:

“‘Ka ihi uiga—te ki ati,—