Morning found us at anchor in the bay and already scattering to our several pursuits. For me, Easter Island was a fairyland. Never, among primitive work, have I seen such sculpture. It far surpassed the best Egyptian work, for every one of those cyclopean heads was a portrait, and almost a perfect one. I cannot better express my feeling for them than by saying that now, as I am writing this account with the memory sharp in my mind, of she strange and terrible events that took place later, I must still turn aside to pay tribute to those statues.
After all they are not so far from my story. Indeed, it was the statues that gave me what should have been a clue—a queer idea that all was not quite as it should be on this island—an idea that I would dismiss as an afterview, were it not that I find on the margin of one of my sketches, made at the time, a note to the effect that something very curious must have happened on the island. Those stones were carved by nothing less than a race of conquerors, with stern high faces, utterly different from the easy-going Polynesians of today. What became of them?
The same impression, of some weird catastrophe, was confirmed by other members of the expedition. There were almost no fish, very little life for the botanists to chew on, and Hertford announced at one of our cabin conferences that the waters, as Agassiz had reported, were quite devoid of plankton. He pooh-poohed the idea of the subsidence of a large land put forth by De Salza, our geologist. “Subsidence,” he said, “would leave the plankton and fish untouched. It is more as though some destructive organism had swept every trace of life from the locality. All the birds and the few fish are obviously recent immigrants, like the people.”
Despite my entreaties for more time to make sketches, the scientists had done about all they could with this barren land in a week or so, and we hauled up anchor for Sala-y-Gomez, three hundred miles further east, taking a couple of the islanders with us. In spite of its atmosphere of ruin and gloom I was sorry to leave Easter Island, but there was the possibility that Sala-y-Gomez might contain some traces of the Easter script or carvings, and I felt it necessary to refuse Hertford’s offer to leave me and stop on the way back.
Upon Sala-y-Gomez too, we came just at evening, marking it by the white line of foam along its low-lying shores as we felt our way slowly among the reefs, and here occurred another of those trivial incidents which are straws pointing in the direction of hidden things.
I was standing by the rail with Howard, the icthyological man, idly watching the wires of the dredge where they interrupted the slow curls of water turned back by our bow when there was a heavy muffled clang, and we saw the lines of the dredge tighten to tensity. Howard signalled for it to be drawn in, and together we watched the big scoop, eager to see what it had encountered. To our surprise it held only a little sea-weed.
“Now that’s odd,” said Howard, searching the sea-weed, with a small hand glass. “I could have sworn that dredge caught something heavy.”
“It did,” I answered, pointing. There was a long scratch of bright metal along one side.
“Corals possibly,” he remarked. “Hey, Bronson, any reefs charted here?”
The mate strolled up. “Not on the charts,” he said, “but you never can tell. These Chilean charts aren’t very good, you know.”
“M-m-m” murmured Howard, continuing his examination. “There ought to be fragments of coralline formation here, but there aren’t. Wonder what is could have been? Almost as though we’d caught something and it got away.”
The thought of Hertford’s comment about a destructive organism slipped into my mind, to be dismissed as not worth mentioning. Rock, shark, almost anything would have made that mark on the dredge.
There were no specimens ready to be sketched in the morning, and I went ashore with the first boat to wander about the island with my drawing materials. It must have been nearly noon when I rounded a jutting outcrop of rock to see before me a little sandy cove, placid and unresponsive in the heat, without a sign of life. Far ahead, a dark blob of rock was the only mark on the perfect line of the beach. It was so suave a scene that I sat down to make a sketch. After I had pencilled it in and was mixing the brown color for the cliffs, I noted that the rock seemed to have moved, but I attributed it to imagination and went on with my coloring. It must have been quite ten minutes when I looked up again. This time there could be no doubt—neither the outline nor the position of the rock were at all as I had recorded them.
In some excitement, I started to climb down the cliff toward this singular rock that changed place and form, but the distance was considerable, and while I was still a quarter of a mile away, it moved again, visibly this time, sliding down to the water’s edge, where it disappeared beneath the gentle surge. The most peculiar thing about it was that there seemed to be no sensible method of progress; it flowed, like a huge, irregular drop of liquid.
I hurried back to the camp with my sketch and my tale, but found the rest in no condition to listen. Old Makoi Toa, one of the Easter Islanders we had brought along with us, had been killed, apparently by a snake. “He was fishing down the beach ahead of the rest,” said Howard, “just out of sight beyond that rock. We all heard him scream, and hurried to the spot. When we got there he was already dead, with a round hole in his chest, and shortly after he turned that hideous blue black that people turn to who die of snake-bite. It might have been one of those sea-snakes but for the size of the wound.”
“I’m sure I saw something sliding away into the water,” added Greaves, the botanist, “but it didn’t look in the least like a snake.”
The shadow of the old man’s death lay on our little cabin conference that night, inhibiting speech, though the means of it remained a mystery. It was not until I told my tale that there was any conversation at all. As I finished there was a little moment of silence, during which each one made the obvious parallel between the occurrence and the death of Makoi Toa, and then Professor Hertford asked to see my sketch. He looked at it closely for a moment.
“Unless I am mistaken, gentlemen,” he said, “we are facing an unknown organism of serious potentialities. May I ask that you do not go ashore to-morrow unless you are well armed and in pairs?”
“What is it, professor?” asked de Salza.
“I would prefer not to hazard a guess just yet. I may be in error.” And that was the last word on the subject that we could draw from him, although de Salza laughed at the idea of anything sinister in connection with this little spot of land.
The next day was bright and clear, and after attending the burial service for Makoi Toa, I sought Greaves and together we made for the spot where I had seen the moving rock. I admit we were culpable in not going armed as the professor advised, but who would then have thought….?
We reached the place about the same time I had been there the previous day, climbed down the cliffs with each other’s help, and walked across the white sand of the cove, to where I had seen the moving rock. It was not more than ten yards from the edge of a place where the receding tide of years had left a number of little arched caves. Just where I had sketched the rock was a ridge of sand pulled aside by the weight of whatever had been there, and in the center of it, a round, bard ball, perhaps three or four inches in diameter. Greaves picked it up, turning it over curiously.
“Why, it’s feathers and bones,” he said, extending if to me, “just as though it had been regurgitated by a pelican or an eagle after a meal.”
I reached my hand for it, and just then, by the grace of Providence, caught a flicker of motion out of the tail of my eye. I turned to meet it; my foot gave on the soft sand, and I fell prone. It was the fall that saved me for something sharp whistled not an inch past my shoulder as I went down. The next instant I heard Greaves shout, and felt him tug my arm, and in the same moment something cold and clammy and hard grated and gripped against my foot. A horrible fear, the fear of imminent death, turned me to ice; I seemed incapable of movement, but somehow got to one knee, and between my own efforts and Greaves’ pull, the grip on my foot relaxed. I half stumbled, half-rolled down the sand, and as I did so, there was another whistling flash and something struck the pocket of my coat, going right through the cloth and the sketch pad beneath it, to fall short of my skin by the narrowest of margins. Greaves was pulling me to my feet, and in a moment we were running.
In the interests of science I regret that we stood not on the order of our going. Neither of us spoke till we turned and paused at the top of the cliff, after a breathless climb. The cove was as empty as it had been before.
“My God—What was it?” I gasped.
“I don’t know, I don’t know.” Greaves was half sobbing with excitement. “Something big and sort of—all soft—threw those things at us—half a dozen of the them—My God.”
We were both so much shaken that the journey back to the camp seemed interminable, and it was some time after our arrival before a consecutive story could be gotten out of Greaves. When he did tell his tale, it
