and four wide, and in shape something like a cockedhat, being higher at both ends than towards the centre. It is entirely volcanic, with many large extinct craters, one in the western half, but towards the centre of the island, being over 1,000 feet high. There is no running water, but several springs near the shore, and deep pools in some of the craters. There are no trees, the tallest vegetation being bushes of Hibiscus, Edwardsia, and Broussonettia, ten or twelve feet high. Decayed trunks of trees are, however, found, and the paddles and other wooden articles in possession of the natives show that formerly there must have been wood in abundance. The natives are fair Polynesians, resembling those of Tahiti and the Marquesas; but they are said to be cannibals occasionally. Both sexes are tattooed, but the women more elaborately. Their weapons are clubs, spears, lances, and double-headed paddles, which seem to be peculiar to them. Their houses are long and low, like a canoe bottom upwards, with a small opening at the side of about twenty inches, serving for door and window.

This island is celebrated for its wonderful remains of some prehistoric people, consisting of stone houses, sculptured stones, and colossal stone images. At the extreme south-west end of the island are a great number (eighty or a hundred) stone houses built in regular lines, with doors facing the sea. The walls are five feet thick by five and a half feet high, built of layers of irregular flat stones, but lined inside with upright flat slabs. The inner dimensions are forty feet by thirteen feet, and they are covered in by their

slabs overlapping like tiles, till the centre opening is about five feet wide, which is then covered in by long thin slabs of stone. The upright slabs inside are painted in red, black, and white, with figures of birds, faces, mythic animals, and geometric figures. Great quantities of a univalve shell were found in many of the houses, and in one of them a statue eight feet high and weighing four tons, now in the British Museum.

Near these houses the rocks on the brink of the sea cliffs are carved into strange shapes, resembling tor toises, or into odd faces. There are hundreds of these sculptures often overgrown with bushes and grass. Much more extraordinary are the platforms and images now to be described. On nearly every headland round the coast of the island are enormous platforms of stone, now more or less in ruins. Towards the sea they present a wall twenty or thirty feet high, and from two hundred to three hundred feet long, and built of large stones often six feet long, and accurately fitted together without cement. Being built on sloping ground, the back wall is lower, usually about a yard high, leaving a platform at the top thirty feet wide, with square ends. Landwards a wide terrace, more than a hundred feet broad, has been levelled, terminated by another step formed of stone. On these platforms are large slabs serving as pedestals to the images which once stood upon them, but which have now been thrown down in all directions, and more or less mutilated.

One of the most perfect of the platforms had fifteen images on it. These are trunks terminating at the

hips, the arms close to the side, the hands sculptured in very low relief on the haunches. They are flatter than the natural body. The usual size of these

statues was fifteen or eighteen feet high, but some were as much as thirty-seven feet, while others are only four or five. The head is flat, the top being cut off level to allow a crown to be put on. These crowns were made of red vesicular tuff, found only at a crater called Terano Hau, about three miles from the stone houses. At this place there still remain thirty of these crowns waiting for removal to the several platforms, some of them being ten and a half feet in diameter. The images, on the other hand, are made of grey, compact, trachytic lava, found only at the crater of Otouli, quite the east end of the island, and about eight miles from the 'crown' quarry. Near the crater is a large platform, on which a number of gigantic images are still standing, the only ones erect on the island. The face and neck of one of these measures twenty feet to the collar-bone, and is in good preservation. The faces of these images are square, massive, and disdainful in expression, the aspect always upwards. The lips are remarkably thin the upper lip being short, and the lower lip thrust up. The eye-sockets are deep, and it is believed that eyeballs of obsidian were formerly inserted in them. The nose is broad, the nostrils expanded, the profile somewhat varied in the different images, and the ears with long pendant lobes. The existing natives knew nothing about these images. They possess, however, small figures carved in solid dark wood, with strongly aquiline profile, differing from

that of the images, the mouth grinning, and a small tuft on the chin.

Wooden tablets, covered with strange hieroglyphics, have also been found; but it is evident that these wooden carvings, as well as those of stone, are the relics of a former age. The people have a tradition that many generations ago a migration took place from Oporo or Rapa Iti, one of the Soro Archipelago, and 2,300 miles to the westward. Hence they call their present abode Rapa Nui, or Great Rapa, to distinguish it from Rapa Iti, or Little Rapa. An implement of stone, a mere long pebble with a chiseledge, is believed to have been the chief tool used in producing these wonderful statues; but it is almost incredible that with such imperfect appliances, works so gigantic could have been executed, literally by hundreds, in an island of such insignificant dimensions, and so completely isolated from the rest of the world. This difficulty is so great that some writers have suggested an ancient civilisation over the Pacific as the only means of overcoming it. The forces of distant groups of islands might then have been combined for the execution of these remarkable works in a remote island, which may perhaps have been the sanctuary of their religion, and the supposed dwelling-place of their gods.

At present Easter Island is the great mystery of the Pacific, and the more we know of its strange antiquities, the less we are able to understand them.

CHAPTER XIX.

THE SOLOMON ISLANDS.

VERY little is known of the Solomon Group of islands, discovered by Mendana in 1668 (40° 36′ S. lat., and 151° 55′ E., and 162° 30′ E. long.), and that little is not, as a rule, of a pleasant character. They are inhabited by dark-skinned, woolly-headed Papuans, and though the Fiji Government-conducted labour vessels are breaking the ice and demonstrating that every white man is not necessarily a man-stealer, it has been for years past a terra incognita to those profoundly versed in other islands of the Southern Seas.

The group consists of a double row of islands extending nearly 700 miles in a north-west and southeast direction. The four northern islands vary from 120 to 150 miles long and from twenty to thirty miles wide. Bougainville Island (10,171 feet high), the largest island, has its northern point 130 miles east of the southern point of New Ireland, and is followed by Choiseul, Ysabel, and Malayta Islands, the straits between them varying from fifteen to fifty miles in width. Parallel with these and some thirty miles