Chapter 2

“That’s Puakatina,” said Bronson the mate, pausing beside me.
“There’s an anchorage right beneath it, but we’ll have to work round
to the west of Cook’s Bay to get shelter from the wind. I was here
on a guano ship ten years ago. Damndest place you ever saw–no
water, no fish, no nothing.”

Morning found us at anchor in the bay and already scattering to our
several pursuits. For me, Easter Island was a fairyland. Never,
among primitive work, have I seen such sculpture. It far surpassed
the best Egyptian work, for every one of those cyclopean heads was a
portrait, and almost a perfect one. I cannot better express my
feeling for them than by saying that now, as I am writing this
account with the memory sharp in my mind, of the strange and terrible
events that took place later, I must still turn aside to pay tribute
to those statues.

After all they are not so far from my story. Indeed, it was the
statues that gave me what should have been a clue–a queer idea that
all was not quite as it should be on this island–an idea that I
would dismiss as an afterview, were it not that I find on the margin
of one of my sketches, made at the time, a note to the effect that
something very curious must have happened on the island. Those
stones were carved by nothing less than a race of conquerors, with
stern high faces, utterly different from the easy-going Polynesians
of today. What became of them?

The same impression, of some weird catastrophe, was confirmed by
other members of the expedition. There were almost no fish, very
little life for the botanists to chew on, and Hertford announced at
one of our cabin conferences that the waters, as Agassiz had
reported, were quite devoid of plankton.* He pooh-poohed the idea of
the subsidence of a large land put forth by De Salza, our geologist.
“Subsidence,” he said, “would leave the plankton and fish untouched.
It is more as though some destructive organism had swept every trace
of life from the locality. All the birds and the few fish are
obviously recent immigrants, like the people.”

* _Plankton_–the passively floating or weakly swimming animal and
plant life of a body of water;–by some applied chiefly to the
organisms found near the surface. (Webster.)

Despite my entreaties for more time to make sketches, the scientists
had done about all they could with this barren land in a week or so,
and we hauled up anchor for Sala-y-Gomez, three hundred miles further
east, taking a couple of the islanders with us. In spite of its
atmosphere of ruin and gloom I was sorry to leave Easter Island, but
there was the possibility that Sala-y-Gomez might contain some traces
of the Easter script or carvings, and I felt it necessary to refuse
Hertford’s offer to leave me and stop on the way back.

Upon Sala-y-Gomez too, we came just at evening, marking it by the
white line of foam along its low-lying shores as we felt our way
slowly among the reefs, and here occurred another of those trivial
incidents which are straws pointing in the direction of hidden things.

I was standing by the rail with Howard, the icthyological man, idly
watching the wires of the dredge where they interrupted the slow
curls of water turned back by our bow when there was a heavy muffled
clang, and we saw the lines of the dredge tighten to tensity. Howard
signalled for it to be drawn in, and together we watched the big
scoop, eager to see what it had encountered. To our surprise it held
only a little seaweed.

“Now that’s odd,” said Howard, searching the seaweed, with a small
hand glass. “I could have sworn that dredge caught something heavy.”

“It did,” I answered, pointing. There was a long scratch of bright
metal along one side.

“Corals possibly,” he remarked. “Hey, Bronson, any reefs charted
here?”

The mate strolled up. “Not on the charts,” he said, “but you never
can tell. These Chilean charts aren’t very good, you know.”

“M–m–m,” murmured Howard, continuing his examination. “There ought
to be fragments of coralline formation here, but there aren’t.
Wonder what it could have been? Almost as though we’d caught
something and it got away.”

The thought of Hertford’s comment about a destructive organism
slipped into my mind, to be dismissed as not worth mentioning. Rock,
shark, almost anything would have made that mark on the dredge.

There were no specimens ready to be sketched in the morning, and I
went ashore with the first boat to wander about the island with my
drawing materials. It must have been nearly noon when I rounded a
jutting outcrop of rock to see before me a little sandy cove, placid
and unresponsive in the heat, without a sign of life. Far ahead, a
dark blob of rock was the only mark on the perfect line of the beach.
It was so suave a scene that I sat down to make a sketch. After I
had pencilled it in and was mixing the brown color for the cliffs, I
noted that the rock seemed to have moved, but I attributed it to
imagination and went on with my coloring. It must have been quite
ten minutes when I looked up again. This time there could be no
doubt–neither the outline nor the position of the rock were at all
as I had recorded them.

In some excitement, I started to climb down the cliff toward this
singular rock that changed place and form, but the distance was
considerable, and while I was still a quarter of a mile away, it
moved again, visibly this time, sliding down to the water’s edge,
where it disappeared beneath the gentle surge. The most peculiar
thing about it was that there seemed to be no sensible method of
progress; it flowed, like a huge, irregular drop of liquid.

I hurried back to the camp with my sketch and my tale, but found the
rest in no condition to listen. Old Makoi Toa, one of the Easter
Islanders we had brought along with us, had been killed, apparently
by a snake.

“He was fishing down the beach ahead of the rest,” said Howard, “just
out of sight beyond that rock. We all heard him scream, and hurried
to the spot. When we got there he was already dead, with a round
hole in his chest, and shortly after he turned that hideous
blue-black that people turn to who die of snake-bite. It might have
been one of those sea-snakes but for the size of the wound.”

“I’m sure I saw something sliding away into the water,” added
Greaves, the botanist, “but it didn’t look in the least like a snake.”

The shadow of the old man’s death lay on our little cabin conference
that night, inhibiting speech, though the means of it remained a
mystery. It was not until I told my tale that there was any
conversation at all. As I finished there was a little moment of
silence, during which each one made the obvious parallel between the
occurrence and the death of Makoi Toa, and then Professor Hertford
asked to see my sketch. He looked at it closely for a moment.