MAJESTIC MOAI
EASTER ISLAND’S TRAGIC TALE STILL RESONATES TO THIS DAY
I often walked among the fabulous stone figures, called moai, that jut from hillsides and oceanside bluffs, or lie on their backs amid the grasslands that cover much of Easter Island today. And knowing the island’s story ends tragically — in strife and cannibalism — makes the appearance of each new statue all the more profound.
A rough trail cuts northeastward from the island’s south coast, toward the volcanic cliffs of Rano Raraku, following the route the moai-builders themselves utilized almost 1,000 years ago to haul the 78-tonne figures from the quarries where they were extracted to the scores of ceremonial sites where they once stood. Along this trail today lie a dozen abandoned figures, half-shrouded in weeds, face up, their expressions uniformly melancholy, their eye sockets unfinished, awaiting the time they’d be set upright and given their eyes. But that time never came. I’d circle each supine moai, trying to grasp why the islanders once dedicated so much effort to such an enterprise; and how their fateful story resonates for the planet today.
The trail ascends the slopes of Rano Raraku, and I find myself walking into a scene I’d studied in National Geographic as a child, and which had evoked in me then a lifelong wish to see the figures first-hand. Ahead, with some of the island’s 2,000 horses grazing amid them, the raised heads begin to appear. First one. Then, three in a cluster. Then a dozen more, some leaning at odd angles, some high above me beneath the mountainside’s cliff-face quarries, some chin-deep in grass. They are black, impressively huge, with pursed lips and countenances of sober, almost sombre concentration, staring seaward like vigilant watchmen waiting for intruders.
But it’s only when I reach the quarries above, where the statues were cut from volcanic rock, that the sheer enormity of the project, and the suddenness of its cessation, becomes clear. The danger to Easter Islanders came, in the end, not from intruders, but from within. In all, 397 more moai, many half-completed, the biggest over 20 m. long, lie within their stone crypts, their extrication halted centuries ago by the onset of civil war. All are eyeless. The quarries, I realize, are a cemetery for blind gods.
My companion on many of these walks is archeological historian, Ramon Edmunds, a descendent of one of the few people who survived the apocalypse that ended just over a century ago. Standing on the shoreline below Rano Raraku with the 15 recently-raised moai of Tongariki nearby, Edmunds, a stick in his hand, gestures toward the land that spreads out before us. The upland pastures where cattle and horses graze are burnished to pale celadon beneath a tropical sun. And big, open-ocean waves explode against the sea cliffs at our backs. Where before us there was once an ancient ceremonial plaza and village — and Edmunds points — there is nothing. The 15 standing moai today guard emptiness. “The destruction, the warfare, the deaths …” he says with regret, “have left much of what happened here a mystery. The oral history I heard as a child breaks … and the rest is myth.”
Legend says — describing events with ominous modern parallels — that the Easter Islanders’ flagrant consumption and population explosion 700 years ago led to forest clear-cutting, fuel shortages, and rising temperatures; and these, in turn, led to soil degradation and famine. But the raising of Easter Island’s massive stone figures, propelled by the statues’ benefactors, continued unabated. Bigger became better. Prestige lay in size. So the aristocracy, trying to outdo each other in a suicidal competition, funded moai that grew to monsters.
Heu Rapu, a local gaucho who daily herds his 250 head of cattle and horses on those upland pastures, appears, and the three of us talk about what once was and what is coming to Easter Island. Of the moai, Rapu agrees, little is known of their purpose, or of the religion they once embodied. They are, he’s sure, the living faces of his ancestors; the rest is conjecture. When Norwegian anthropologist and author Thor Heyerdahl came to the island in the 1950s, the stonework convinced him Easter Island’s settlers came originally from Andean South America, just as his famous, trans-Pacific Kon-Tiki raft expedition had aimed to prove in 1947. Author Erich von Danniken speculated, on the other hand, it would have been impossible for humans to move the immense figures, and attributed their construction to extraterrestrials who, he argued, utilized laser beams to cut the stone from the Rano Raraku quarries.
Modern science has a more plausible explanation. Linguistic, genetic, archeological, and mythological accounts agree: the original Easter Islanders, riding outrigger canoes, left Polynesia’s Marquesa archipelago, 7,000 km. to the west, around 300 AD. Somehow, after months of sailing eastward across the ocean, these seafarers hit the 15 km.-wide, uninhabited speck that came to be called Easter Island. With plentiful fish, birds, palm trees, and fertile fields, they believed they’d found paradise. They established farms, clans, and — fatefully — an aristocracy. Over time, however, the aristocracy’s excesses produced an unhappy underclass.
Then things began to fall apart. The extraordinary legacy this vanished civilization left, including 900 or so moai, is beginning to affect the life of the easygoing people who inhabit Easter Island today. A half-century ago, when Thor Heyerdahl wrote his book Aku Aku: The 1958 Expedition to Easter Island, few would have been able to locate the place on a map. Today, there are daily flights and regular cruise-ship stops. These visitors are drawn by the cautionary environmental story surrounding the place, by the collection of standing moai, and by the 1995 designation of Easter Island’s Rapa Nui National Park as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
On my last day on Easter Island, I walked with Edmunds amid miniature volcanic cones to the Puna Pau archeological site, located just outside the island’s tiny capital of Hanga Roa. From this hilltop vantage point, the farms that today surround the little, tin-roofed village are visible. All is peaceful. An afternoon breeze off the Pacific riffles the yellowing grass. I know that beyond the few thousand people living quietly below, the rest of humanity lies far, far away. To the south, there’s nothing until Antarctica, 5,000 km. distant. To the north, the Galápagos Islands, 3,700 km. away. The coast of Chile lies 3,700 km. to the east. And to the west 2,000 km. are Easter Island’s nearest neighbours, the few dozen inhabitants of Pitcairn Island. Easter Island is the most remote human-inhabited place on Earth.
In fact, for over 1,000 years, legends say, no one came to there. And once the last tree was chopped down, there was no wood to make a boat to leave. “You sit and look out,” Edmunds says, gesturing toward the ocean,” “and you see nothing. And you wonder — as people must have wondered then: ‘What’s out there?’ After centuries of isolation — being entirely cut off from the world — people must have come to believe that they were alone on Earth that there was no on else. A little island … lost in time and space.”