White Fire

by John Oxenham

Captain Cathie, coasting down the lagoon in the launch, had reported several fine wide valleys opening up into the hills, and Blair determined to try to induce some of the others to move farther down the coast and start fresh settlements there.

So far as Cathie had seen—and he was much too cautious to land until he knew more about what he might meet ashore—these valleys seemed unoccupied and capable of profitable occupation.

But Ha'o, when the idea was mooted, only shook his head mysteriously, and said they would never go there. No one lived there. No one ever had lived there. Farther down there were scattered communities, but the men rarely came up this way because they had made a practice of eating them whenever they got the chance. Over the mountains also there were villages, exclusive for the same reason.

And when Blair suggested the idea to Ra'a and the others, and offered to assist them in laying out taro fields and yam plantations, he was met in the same way. He could get nothing more out of them. The subject was so evidently distasteful that he determined to go and find out for himself, if possible, what the objectionable features were.

And so, very early one morning, he set off in one of the whale-boats, with Matti and Stuart and four men, and they pulled quietly along round the great frontlet of the hills till they came to the first opening into the hinterland, some five miles from the settlement.

Keeping a sharp look-out, they ran in on a fine white shell beach, and took cautious way up a wide valley from which the hills rolled back in long sweeping slopes, well bushed, and thick with palms. Gay flights of paraquets flashed in and out of the bushes, and the soft crooning of multitudinous wood-pigeons was like the humming of bees in a summer garden. A broad stream flowed through the valley, widening into silvery pools and glittering over broken shallows.

"It's an ideal place," said Blair. "What on earth has kept them out of it?"

They passed cautiously on through the tangled undergrowth. In front was the sound of falling waters, an intermittent drenching splash, now heard, now lost, as though a raincloud burst and passed and came again; otherwise a wide and perfect silence, which the droning of the doves seemed but to accentuate.

Through dense tangles of lemon hibiscus, and crowding paw-paws, and stilted pandanus, and the gleaming boles of the palms, they saw the valley widen into a great arc, and caught glimpses of mighty walls of rock which marked the end of it. And presently they were standing below, and gazing up in awed amazement.

In the shadow of the cliff, with their backs to it and their faces to the sea, sat a row of gigantic stone figures, gazing out In solemn silence through the slow-waving tops of the palms, the ephemeral palms which had grown and died in countless generations, and had crept gradually nearer and nearer, since those grim figures first sat down there, with their backs to the cliff and their faces to the sea.