442 | ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1944 
a paved highway is seen on close examination to be only a bed of 
lava that in its flow reached the sea. 
Other writers, abandoning the hypothesis of the sunken continent, 
have advanced the view that Easter Island is the center of an archi- 
pelago which vanished beneath the waves in a great cataclysm not 
so many centuries ago. They suggest further that the inhabitants of 
this supposed string of islands had used Easter Island asa burial place 
for their dead. According to this surmise, the dream Land of Davis 
would have been among the many islands that were submerged. But 
no geological facts can be found to support this theory either. We 
know, too, that the sanctuaries of Easter Island continued to be used 
as burial places by the islanders as recently as 70 years ago. Ruins 
of old villages near the monuments are added evidence that this 
speck of land was inhabited by the living in former times as it is 
today, and that it could not have been merely a mausoleum. 
However, there remains the baffling fact that such a diminutive 
island is covered with great statues, some of them 30 or 40 feet high and 
weighing many tons. Despite my skepticism about the elaborate 
theories offered in explanation of this miraculous flowering of sculp- 
ture, I must confess that I, too, like all previous travelers to the island, 
was overwhelmed by a feeling of astonishment and awe when I first 
saw them. 
There are few spectacles in the world more impressive than the 
sight of the statue quarry on the slopes of Ranoraraku. The place is 
indeed sinister. Imagine a half-crumbled volcano, a black shore line, 
and huge cliffs which rise up from the sea with smooth green pastures 
above them. Guarding the quarry, near the volcano, is an army of 
giant stone figures scattered in the most picturesque disorder. Most 
of them still stand out boldly. Successive landslides have partially 
covered others, so that only their heads emerge from the ground, like 
those of a cursed race buried alive in quicksand. Behind the rows 
of the erect statues, along the slopes of the volcano, there are 150 
figures still in the process of being born. Wherever one looks in the 
quarry, one sees half-finished sculpture. Ledges of the mountain 
have been given human shape. Caves have been opened in which 
statues rest like those on medieval sepulchers in the crypt of some 
great cathedral. Hardly a single surface has been left uncarved by 
the artists in their frenzy to exploit the soft tufa of the mountain. 
There is something weird in the sight of this deserted workshop with 
the dead giants all about. At every step, one stumbles over discarded 
stone hammers. It is as if the quarry had been abandoned on the 
eve of some holiday, and the workers were expecting on the day after 
to return and resume their tasks; indeed, in several cases, only a few 
more blows would have been needed to cut the statues finally free 
from the rock of the slope. 
