172 THE LAST CRUISE OF THE CARNEGIE 



The grotesque heads are quite flat behind, as though a knife 

 had sHced off vertically the whole after half behind the ears. 

 This represents an ideal of beauty not confined to this island, 

 since many Polynesian peoples shaped infants' heads in this 

 pattern in stone molds or wooden forms. 



Everywhere one sees evidence of a sudden interruption of the 

 work of the sculptors. Some statues are still undetached from their 

 rocky beds high up on the hillside, some have fallen to pieces in the 

 process of lowering them down, some are only roughly blocked out, 

 while others were apparently being moved to the platforms around 

 the coast when all work ceased. It has been suggested that these 

 were busts of great chiefs. No one knows. The magnificent 

 architectural plan for a complete double line of images facing each 

 other around the thirty-odd miles of coast, with a paved ceremonial 

 floor between, can be easily made out even now. The shaping 

 of these twenty- to sixty -ton images with no tools but stone, sand, 

 and water, is no more remarkable than the tooling of the much 

 harder material of the platforms and foundations which ring the 

 island. Some of us were to see the famous Inca work in the 

 Titicaca region in Peru, but in places this masonry was equally 

 impressive. 



What this great outburst of the memorial arts means is still 

 a mystery. Was Easter Island to be the burial ground for other 

 Polynesian islands? How could it have been, when the nearest 

 is over a thousand miles away, and only open canoes were known 

 to the ancients. The only instruments of navigation we heard of 

 were crude gourds drilled with holes for measuring altitudes, while 

 no chronometers were known. And how were these enormous 

 finished statues transported for ten or fifteen miles across the rough 

 lava-fields without breakage? There has never been found a 

 trace of forest on the island to furnish wood for levers or sledges. 

 The engineering of the pyramids presented no greater problems. 



To account for the former great population, McMillan Brown 

 has developed a theory which he discusses in his book, "The Riddle 

 of the Pacific." He presupposes a nearby archipelago which was 

 submerged in historical times. He bases his assumptions on the 

 following evidence : Easter Island legends say that the first settlers 



