ysterious race that once quickened the land, this
lonely outlier of the isles of the Southern Seas is called in their
soft tongue Rapanui, or the Great Rapa.

* * * * *

A hundred and seventy years ago Roggewein, on the dawn of an Easter
Sunday, discerned through the misty, tropic haze the grey outlines of
an island under his lee beam, and sailed down upon it.

He landed, and even as the grim and hardy old navigator gazed upon and
wondered at the mysteries of the strange island, so this day do the
cunning men of science, who, perhaps once in thirty years, go thither
in the vain effort to read the secret of an all-but-perished race. And
they can tell us but vaguely that the stupendous existing evidences of
past glories are of immense and untold age, and show their designers to
have been coeval with the builders of the buried cities of Mexico and
Peru; beyond that, they can tell us nothing.

Who can solve the problem? What manner of an island king was he who
ruled the builders of the great terraced platforms of stone, the
carvers of the huge blocks of lava, the hewers-out with rudest tools of
the Sphinx-like images of trachyte, whose square, massive, and
disdainful faces have for unnumbered centuries gazed upwards and
outwards over the rolling, sailless swell of the mid-Pacific?

* * * * *

And the people of Rapa-nui of to-day? you may ask. Search the whole
Pacific--from Pylstaart, the southern sentinel of the Friendlies, to
the one-time buccaneer-haunted, far-away Pelews; thence eastward
through the white-beached coral atolls of the Carolines and Marshalls,
and southwards to the cloud-capped Marquesas and the sandy stretches of
the Paumotu--and you will find no handsomer men or more graceful women
than the light-skinned people of Rapa-nui.

* * * * *

Yet are they but the survivors of a race doomed--doomed from the day
that Roggewein in his clumsy, high-pooped frigate first saw their land,
and marvelled at the imperishable relics of a dead greatness. With
smiling faces they welcomed him--a stranger from an unknown, outside
world, with cutlass at waist and pistol in hand--as a god; he left them
a legacy of civilisation--a hideous and cruel disease that swept
through the amiable and unsuspicious race as an epidemic, and slew its
thousands, and scaled with the hand of Death and Silence the eager life
that had then filled the square houses of lava in many a town from the
wave-beaten cliffs of Terano Kau to Ounipu i