Easter Island by John Dos Passos

Author:John Dos Passos [Passos, John Dos]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-78705-7
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-03-22T16:00:00+00:00

The great statues. Tonight I shan’t forget them the way I did this morning. My siesta over and done with I asked the first person I saw who was Atamou to please take me to the sepulchers. He understood, which seemed miraculous. I said sepulchers in Tahitian marae and on Easter Island marae because these colossi of stone, the object of our journey, ornament the places where they used to bury, under piles of stones, the great chiefs killed in battle. This name of marae the natives also give to the thousand figures of fetishes and idols that fill their reed houses and which are linked in spirit with the memory of the dead.

So we set forth. Atamou and I without trailing a procession behind us, all alone to visit the nearest marae. This is my first journey on the unknown island. Following the seashore we cross a plain covered by an odd grass, sad colored and faded in appearance.

On our road we found the ruins of a small house like the one the Dane lives in. Atamou explains it was the house of the papa farani French father, missionary. He stopped to tell a tale, with an excess of mimicry, a story probably very moving which I didn’t understand very well; from his gestures I can imagine ambushes, men hidden behind stones, gunshots and lances thrown—what did the poor priest do to them? One never knows what degree of sudden ferocity may overwhelm a savage, ordinarily gentle and coaxing, when one of these primitive passions is aroused or some obscure superstition. We must not forget that an instinct for cannibalism smoulders at the most intimate center of the Polynesian nature, so attractive and debonair; also that off there in Oceania, the Maoris in spite of their charming manners will sometimes still eat you.

His story told, Atamou, persuaded that I had understood every word, takes me by the hand and we continue our walk.

In front of us here is a mound of brown stones like the Gallic cromlechs but formed of much more enormous blocks, it dominates; on one side the sea where nothing passes; on the other the desolate plain limited in the distance by extinct craters. Atamou assures me that this is the marae and the two of us climb up on the stones.

One would say a cyclopean platform half hidden by a mass of collapsed columns, irregular and roughly carved. I’m asking for statues which I can’t see anywhere. Atamou, with a curious gesture, points down at my feet. I was perched on the chin of one of them which lying on its back stared at me through the two holes that served him for eyes. I hadn’t imagined it so large and formless but to tell the truth, I hadn’t noticed it at all. There must have been ten of them lying on their backs half broken. Some last quake of the adjacent volcanoes without a doubt shook them down and the noise of their fall must have been terrible.

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