THE MOST MYSTERIOUS ISLANDS.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXII, Issue 9556, 31 July 1909, Page 3

THE MOST MYSTERIOUS ISLANDS.

Easter Island—it ha 3 half-a-dozen other titles—is one of the moat isolated spots in the world of waters. Eastwards from it the nearest point of land is in South America, 2.300 miles distant. ■ Westwards New Zealand is 4,500 miles away. Northwards there is nothing closer than Mexico, 3,000 miles off. Southwards the Pacific rolls unbroken into the Antarctic Ocean and the unexplored regions round the South Pole. Out of the midst of this circling waste of waters Easter Island rises as the peak of a submarine mountain higher than Mont Blanc; a speck of land from which nothing save sea and sky are visible from year's end to year's end.

The island is entirely outside the tracks of ordinary navigation. Years pass without a ship coming close to it; its inhabitants reckon up?n their fingers the number of vessels that have visited them during the present generation. A more unlikely place to hold, the relics of a long-forgotten civilisation it would be difficult to imagine. Yet that is what gives the little-known island its chief interest. There are theorists who maintain that it contains traces of a race far older than any other known to twentieth century sci'cnce. Astronomers and geologists have reason for believing that the moon was thrown off by the earth from the region now covered by the abyssmal gulfs of the Pacific. It is impossible that Easter Island represents a summit that rose above the waters after the tremendous cataclysm.

In the present day, when the island ' is sighted at all, it is most 'frequently approached by vessels bound to or from the Chilian ports and those to the eastern seaboard of Australia. When nearing it from the direction of the former it looks at first like two roundled islands; an appearance due to the fact that its twelve mile long coast is indented towards the centre by a large bay. This, however, provides little or no shelter, and the island otherwise posseses no harbour worth calling such. It is accessible only by landing upon one of its sandy beaches, through the surf from the ocean swell which thunders upon them almost continually.

'On the headlands that partially protect many of these beaehea are great platforms such as modern military engineers provide for the reception of large hattsries of vary heavy guns. But no present day engineer would dream of facing and flooring such constructions with the monolithic masses that have gone to the creation of these platforms. It la even doubtful whether the most advanced modern appliances could handle the huge stones in such a situation. Some are six to twelve feet long, by four to six feet deep and widr, and their weight is so great that even the biggest of steam cranes could hardely move them, much less swing them intc their present position on a steep hillside. What th D ir object was rai orly be conjectured. They may have been places of worship-•though that so is by no means clear —for behind them, on a terraced shelf, are pedestals upon which immense stone images stood once in rowf. But some great shock must have upset most of these, for nearly all of them—and there are thousands

—r.ovv lie shattered upon the platform they once overlooked. 'Nearly all are three-quarter human figures, having their arms set close to their sides, and with faces bearing a lofty expression that gues incongruously with the absurdly large ears with which they are decorated. A few wear caps, or crowns, separately carved and set upon their htads, but the majority of the figures have lost their ornaments, which now rest beside them in the ground. Here 'the puzzle deepens, for some of these crowns are ten feet round; the images they adorned having been 40ft high. What this v means can be gathered from the fact that one of the smaller statues, only Bft high, now in the British Museum, weighs four tons. The men who handled these immense blocks must have possessed mechanical genius of no mean order, and must have been first class sailors. The quarry from which the masses were cut is within the quiescent crater of Otuiti, in the centre of the island, miles from the positions in which the statues had been placed, and there are indications in other far distant islanns that there was an export trade in the monoliths over wide expanses of ocean. There are to be seen in the quarry to-day in ail stages of manufacture, from the figure just outlined in the hard, grey, volcanic rock of which thev consist, to the completed statue ready to be sent away. But no tools or machinery remains beyond a few obsidian cnisels with which it would be impossible to carve out works of such magnitude.

The inhabitants of the island, about 1,500 in number, were naked cannibals when it was discovered by the Dutch Admiral Koggeveen on rCaster Sunday, 1722, and they remained in their savagery untiL 1864, when Christianity was introduced by Roman Catholic missionaries, and they are now all devout churchpeople. They have not, and appear never to have had,- any traditions which would throw light upon the origin of the colossal rtlhs amongst which they live, but say that their forefathers found them as they are when they chanced to drift to the island in two canoes from far to the west; a story confirmed by the evident relationship of the people with one of the Polynesian races. Their predecessors, whoever they were, have left stone houses behind them, erections 100 ft long by 20ft wide, decorated inside with lines and paintings that indicate a knowledge of geometry and of ait. Ther<! is a'so what seems to be picture writing on the mck faces near them, and a few wooden tablets have been found bearing similar inscriptions, but, so far, no key has been discovered to the script, if it be such. Is is significant that the best preserved of the houses have been seen on the lip of Terano Kau, an extinct volcano 1,300 ft above the sea level. Were they placed there as observatories from which '.skilled men of the lost race rright keep watch at once upon the fiery forces that had overwhelmed their continent and upon the wide ocean, pierced only by the 'aulitary peak upon which they ihad

sought successful refuge, across which aid might come? It is certain that the island, once densely wooded, has been stripped af its timber for purposes of a population infinitely denser than its present one. The survivors of the cataclysm out of which it came into being may have cut down the trees to build ships in which to escape, leaving some of their number behind to carve its rocks into semblance of a great temple in token of thankfulness for deliverance. The voyagers may have been unable to return, or they may have been tost in the depths of the Pacific. The those remaining must have died out, or they may have perished from thirst, for the spot depends mainly upon an erratic rainfall for its water supply. These are the problems that may be solved if the place becomes, as its iikely enough, a telegraph station when "wireless" is established between South America and Austraia. Meantime Easter continues to be the most mysterious of islands.