THE WEIRD STATUES ON EASTER ISLAND.

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 75, Issue 152, 30 June 1932, Page 2

THE WEIRD STATUES ON EASTER ISLAND.

it is difficult to describe the weird spell of this barren island. One is instantly conscious oj the difference between it and other human reliquaries. Chiefly it seems to lie in the fact that there is no dividing line between prehistoric past and the present. Ihe old order has never given way to a new. Antiquity here is not something that one can study only across a chasm of centuries. It persists. At the gates of Damascus a person thrills at the thought that he has turned back the calendar two thousand years. Here he does not need to turn back a calendar. In the ruined cities of the Khmer s, of an evening when the moon is full and the loose-headed drums are sounding, the wanderer feels that the clock has stopped. On Easier he has the uncanny certainty that there never was any clock- •• • Ahead rises the cone of Rano Raraku, cleft by some convulsion so that its seaside face is a peipendicular precipice nearly a thousand feet high, formidable and menacing. The spectacle of this gicat Wa is in itself an awesome thing to travellers who have known the endless flatness of the Pacific. Put one speedily forgets it as one comes closer to the west slope and sees the sphinx-like images tank on )ani(, cailying on, as they have carried on for hundreds of years, their inspection of the empty landscape and the inleiminable sea. At first sight their vertical black lines against the yellow green of the grass-covered slope suggest an irregular and badly broken barrier zoning the crater. From closer at hand, when their size becomes ™oie evident, they seem like the ruined columns of some vast Work hk e the temple of justice at Palmyia. 1 hen one comes squarely under the hill and sees faces peering at one from a hundred angles faces that expiess plainly an annoyance at one's past and a lack °f hope in one s future. How did they come'here? What engineering genius worked out a plan for their transportation. What great organizer massed the man-power that put his plan into execution? The carving of the statues is in itself enough of a puzzle but after all a matter whose details map be worked out by those who understand sculpture. 7he engineering problems are far removed fiom a world of power machines and derricks and winches. The largest of these great monoliths weighs something more than forty tons—the smallest of them twenty tons—and in this treeless land must have been moved without rollers by the crude strength of bare brown arms. r ji j J Wherever one turns on Easter—from Rano Kao on the southwest corner to the eastern headland an from there tg the tall peak °f Pano Aroi on the north—one finds these images.—Robert J. Casey, in “Easier Island."