| Carol Ann (Gratsos) Howell....page7 |
| VACATION #5 A VERY MYSTERIOUS ISLAND You board a Lan Chile jet in Santiago. It will take you five and a half hours to fly the two thousand three hundred miles to mysterious Easter Island in the South Pacific. The island really has three names, depending on what language you're speaking. In Spanish it's called la Isla de Pascua (pascua means Easter and Christmas). The islanders call it Rapa Nui. Explorer Thor Hyderdal called it "the navel of the world" because it is so isolated. As your jet circles, you look down at the velvet blue ocean. All sides of the island fall off into cliffs. The island is triangular with a volcano in each corner. There are only seventy square miles of rocky ground with little vegetation growing in the volcanic soil. The airport is nothing but a small wooden building in the middle of nowhere. Inside, it's jammed with people shouting and pushing. Polynesian people are yelling their names so the passengers can find them and go stay at their homes. The weather is subtropical. Plenty of sun and plenty of rain. You go outside to wait for your driver. You stand under a thatched lean-to. It's raining. He pulls up in a van and takes you to the home of Rosita Cardinelli. She has rooms to rent with private baths. From your room you can see the Pacific and hear the surf. Heaven. The rain stops, and at dusk you walk a block down the muddy clay road to the sea. There, at the end of the street, at the harbor, you see your first moai. He gazes at the sea from his platform, solitary, silent, his body decorated with algae. He stands in a place of honor, Plaza Hotumalua. When you get back, Rosita has your fresh lobster dinner waiting. The next morning is very sunny. You ride a small delicate horse out to see the famous seven moais on the cliff. They are turned away from the sea, but they, too, are watching, waiting, with their big vacant eyes, staring into forever. These enormous statues of Rapa Nui, the abandoned children of the clouds. They were carved out of the skin of Rana Raraku, a volcano miles away. It's a mystery how they were transported to their sites. Made of andesite basalt, the six hundred moais are strewn over the island. Many are ten feet tall. But you look up at the largest moai which is seventy feet tall and weighs two hundred seventy tons. When you ask the natives how the sculptures were transported from the quarry to their present location, they reply, "They went of themselves." Even if they could have, how did they do it without legs? They are just heads and torsos. Leglessly, the moais stand in silence. A fat islander tells you about the old days, "There were the Short Ears and the Long Ears. The giant sculptures depict the Long Ears. They enslaved the Short Ears. A war developed between them. The Long Ears dug a ditch, called Poike, and hid in it in order to attack the Short Ears at dawn. But a Short Ear woman who was married to a Long Ear told her people of the plan. During the night, the Short Ears crept up and burned the Long Ears in their own ditch. Today there are only three people who are direct descendants of the Long Ears. They are proud of their ancestry. The Peruvian slavers came to Rapa Nui bringing smallpox and captured many of the islanders. Death and slavery claimed all but one hundred Rapa Nui. Today the islanders speak two languages, clipped Chilean Spanish and Rapa Nui, which is a primitive language. It is almost sung. There is lots of repetition. Lots of vowels and repeated words, such as: a, a-a, or e, e-e. When they don't have the word in Rapa Nui, they throw in a Spanish word, slurred and sometimes grammatically incorrect. The next day you ride a motorcycle over to the volcano Orongo to see the petroglyphs of the bird-man cult. It is told that a man swam out to a little island and retrieved an egg, that he held it in his mouth, perhaps, and swam back. Whoever was able to return with the egg in tact was honored as king for a year. Orongo is a strange lonely place. The glyphs of the bird-man decorate its edge. From their site on the cliff you see the three tiny islands of rock that are the nesting place of the sacred birds. The Rapa Nui are Polynesian, extraordinarily beautiful. For the first time you understand what savage beauty is. The look in their fierce eyes is difficult to describe and a little frightening. You know Latin men undress women with their eyes, but the men of Rapa Nui look deeper than that. Rosita's husband explains in Spanish, "The Latins talk about the heart, but here it is the stomach." You wonder if he means the gut. "What is the look in their eyes?" you ask. "I know what you mean," he says, "but it is a look for which there are no words." You say no more, but you remember that the Rapa Nui were once cannibals. The following day you ride your horse to town, Hanga Roa, which consists of two stores. There are also two discotecs on the island. The two thousand residents are dance crazy. It's Christmas Eve and you spend your last night at the Chilean government's luxury hotel on the cliff having dinner with friends. On the flight back to the mainland the next morning you are silent. It's impossible to verbalize your emotions. You feel intimately associated with the moais, as if you knew in some long ago what they represented, what they meant, and why they waited, but now you have forgotten. The words of Rosita's driver echo in your mind, "This is a very mysterious island ..." ***** |