had been a road.

Right across this path, half lost in shadow, half sunlit, the lianas
hung their ropes. The hotoo tree, with its powdering of delicate
blossoms, here stood, showing its lost loveliness to the sun; in the
shade the scarlet hibiscus burned like a flame. Artu and breadfruit
trees and cocoa-nut bordered the way.

As they proceeded the trees grew denser and the path more obscure. All
at once, rounding a sharp turn, the path ended in a valley carpeted
with fern. This was the place that always filled Emmeline with an
undefined dread. One side of it was all built up in terraces with huge
blocks of stone--blocks of stone so enormous, that the wonder was how
the ancient builders had put them in their places.

Trees grew along the terraces, thrusting their roots between the
interstices of the blocks. At their base, slightly tilted forward as if
with the sinkage of years, stood a great stone figure roughly carved,
thirty feet high at least--mysterious-looking, the very spirit of the
place. This figure and the terraces, the valley itself, and the very
trees that grew there, inspired Emmeline with deep curiosity and vague
fear.

People had been here once; sometimes she could fancy she saw dark
shadows moving amidst the trees, and the whisper of the foliage seemed
to her to hide voices at times, even as its shadow concealed forms. It
was indeed an uncanny place to be alone in even under the broad light
of day. All across the Pacific for thousands of miles you find relics
of the past, like these scattered through the islands.

These temple places are nearly all the same: great terraces of stone,
massive idols, desolation overgrown with foliage. They hint at one
religion, and a time when the sea space of the Pacific was a continent,
which, sinking slowly through the ages, has left only its higher lands
and hill-tops visible in the form of islands. Round these places the
woods are thicker than elsewhere, hinting at the presence there, once,
of sacred groves. The idols are immense, their faces are vague; the
storms and the suns and the rains of the ages have cast over them a
veil. The sphinx is understandable and a toy compared to these things,
some of which have a stature of fifty feet, whose creation is veiled in
absolute mystery--the gods of a people for ever and for ever lost.

The "stone man" was the name Emmeline had given the idol of the valley;
and sometimes at nights, when her thoughts would stray that wa