1G8 cook's first voyase june, 



us, and therefore walked out to a point, upon which 

 we had seen, at a distance, trees that are here called 

 Etoa, which generally distinguish the places where 

 these people bury the bones of their dead : their 

 name for such burying-grounds, which are also places 

 of worship, is Moral We were soon struck with 

 the sight of an enormous pile, which, we were told, 

 was the morai of Oamo and Oberea, and the principal 

 piece of Indian architecture in the island. It was a 

 pile of stone work, raised pyramidically, upon an ob- 

 long base, or square, two hundred and sixty-seven 

 feet long, and eighty-seven wide. It was built like 

 the small pyramidal mounts upon which we some- 

 times ^^ the pillar of a sun-dial, where each side is a 

 flight of steps ; the steps, however, at the sides, were 

 broader than those at the ends, so that it terminated, 

 not in a square of the same figure with the base but 

 in a ridge, like the roof of a house: there were eleven 

 of these steps, each of which was four feet high, so 

 that the height of the pile was forty-four feet ; each 

 step was formed of one course of white coral stone, 

 which was neatly squared and polished ; the rest of 

 the mass, for there was no hollow within, consisted of 

 round pebbles, which, from the regularity of their 

 figure, seemed to have been wrought. Some of the 

 coral stones were very large ; we measured one of 

 them, and found it three feet and a half by two feet 

 and a half. The foundation was of rock stones, 

 which were also squared ; and one of them measured 

 four feet seven inches by two feet four. Such a 

 structure, raised without the assistance of iron tools 

 to shape the stones, or mortar to join them, struck us 

 with astonishment : it seemed to be as compact and 

 firm as it could have been made by any workman in 

 Europe, except that the steps, which range along its 

 greatest length, are not perfectly strait, but sink in a 

 kind of hollow in the middle, so that the whole sur- 

 face, from end to end, is not a right line, but a curve. 

 The quarry stones, as we saw no quarry in the neigh- 



