OF THE SOUTH SEAS 135 



rent into ruins. Its heights were not green Hke Tahiti's, 

 but bare and black, true children of the abysmal cata- 

 clysm which in the time of the making of these oases of 

 the sea thrust them up from the fires of the deep. 



Far up near the peak of Afareaitu, nearly a mile 

 above the wave, in one of the colossal splinters of the 

 basalt rocks, was an eye, an immense round hole through 

 which the sky shone. One saw it plainly from Tahiti. 

 It was made by the giant Pai of Tautira when he threw 

 his spear a dozen miles and pierced a window in the 

 solid granite that all might know his prowess. One 

 felt like a fool to rehearse to a Tahitian, telling one the 

 tale, the statement of scientists that the embrasure had 

 been worn bv water when Afareaitu was under the ocean 

 during its million-year process of rising from the mud. 

 It would be like asking Flammarion, the wisest of 

 French astronomers, to cease beheving in the mystery of 

 transubstantiation. He would smile as would the 

 autochthon. 



There was one picture in murky monochrome which 

 never could be forgotten — a long sierra of broken pinna- 

 cles and crags which had all the semblance of a weathered 

 and dismantled castle. It stood out against the tender 

 blue of the morning sky like the ancient stronghold of 

 some grisly robber-baron of medieval days; towers of 

 dark sublimity, battlements whence invadei;s might have 

 been hurled a thousand feet to death, slender minarets, 

 escarpments and rugged casements through which 

 fleecy clouds peeped from the high horizon. I once saw 

 along the Mediterranean in Italy or France the fastness 

 of a line of nobles, set away up on a lonely hill, glow- 

 ering, gloomy, and unpeopled, the refuge, mayhap, of 



