The land of the lizard men—Facts and fancies,
including a few horrors
Many an hour of quiet content had we of the dream ship spent while moored off Papeete, in watching the ever-changing beauties of Moorea, a bare fifteen miles distant.
Whether viewed in fair or foul weather, at sunrise or sunset, this island with its fantastic volcanic peaks and deep, mysterious valleys of purple haze attracts the eye of the dreamer like a magnet. What secrets lay hidden in those valleys? What might not be seen from the summit of those peaks? We determined to find out.
But first it was necessary to attend to things practical in the shape of our alleged auxiliary engine. It was perfectly possible, here in Papeete, to hire an expert to diagnose the trouble, but I had had my fill of "experts" the world over. They have an engaging habit of setting the contraption in motion by some happy accident, and declaring that "it is all right now," but never by any chance explaining to the harassed owner what was the matter with it. It is my belief that they do not know themselves. The only point on which they are all agreed is that the "expert" who preceded them "made an unholy mess of the job," and that if it had not been for themselves, it is doubtful if the engine would have ever run again. Moreover, their bill is usually in keeping with their modesty.
After a three-hour heart-to-heart consultation with the patient, I discovered, quite by accident and with Peter's hat pin, that the tiny air-vent in the screw-top of one of the carburetors was clogged. Consequently, when the top was screwed down, the air had no outlet and forced down the float. Hence a persistent flooding.
It sounds absurd. It was absurd, but that was the entire trouble, and the accidental insertion of the hat pin converted lifeless scrap-iron into the power that the dream ship had so often and so sorely needed during the past months.
I hear the "experts" laugh, but I solace myself with the remembrance of one of their number leaping on his hat in an effort to locate an equally trivial trouble in marine motor engines, and draw the moral that it is as well to carry sisters who use hat pins.
A few hours' sail brought us to Moorea, and one of the finest natural harbours in the South Pacific, where we were met by a plantation owner of our acquaintance in an outrigger canoe, and piloted through a tortuous reef channel to an anchorage of firm coral sand.
The entrance to this harbour is fully half a mile wide, so how the captain of a French gunboat contrived to pile his vessel securely on the reef is something of a mystery. It is said that he had dined "not wisely but too well" in Papeete, and was filled with élan to demonstrate how close a shave he could accomplish without cutting himself. And again, that he had been sent to bring back cattle, a mission that, as a naval officer, he so abhorred that he had done the deed deliberately.
In any case, there lies his craft, a fine old hulk, with the rollers rumbling and seething through her vitals; fit warning to the mariner who would toy with coral.