a fool to rehearse to a Tahitian,
telling one the tale, the statement of scientists that the embrasure
had been worn by 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 believing 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 pinnacles 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 invaders 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, glowering, gloomy, and unpeopled, the
refuge, mayhap, of the mountain goat, the abiding-place of bats and
other creatures of the night. Moorea's fortress conjured up the vision
of it, its wondrous ramparts and unscalable precipices strangely the
counterpart of the Latin castle.

But if one dropped one's eyes from the hills, gone was the recollection
of aught of Europe. There was a scene which only the lavish colors
of the tropics could furnish. The artist had spilled all his shades
of green upon the palette, and so delicately blended them that they
melted into one another in a very enchantment of green. The valleys
were but darker variants of the emerald scheme.

The confused mass of lofty ridges resolved into chasms and combes,
dark, sunless ravines, moist with the spray of many waterfalls, which
nearer became velvet valleys of pale green, masses of foliage and
light and shadow. The mountains of Moorea were only half the height
of Tahiti's, but so artfully had they been piled in their fantastic
arrangement that they seemed as high, though they were entirely
different in their impress upon the beholder. Tahiti from the sea was
like a living being, so vivid, so palpitating was its contour and its
color, but Moorea, when far away, was cold and black, a beautiful,
ravishing sight, but like the avatars of a race of giants that had
passed, a sepulcher or monument of their achievements and their end.

As about Ta