Easter Island (25 page)

“
Arero!
” he shouts and runs off.

The next day Te Haha appears on his horse with a large sack on his lap. He dismounts hurriedly, and tugs his sack up the hill, zigzagging through the
moai
. As Elsa greets him, he drops the bag and quickly pulls off his hat.

“
Hau,
” he says to Elsa, rounding his lips. “
Hau.
” This is the first time she has seen him without his hat, and a large bald spot crowns his head. “
Hau,
” he says, setting the hat back on his head. From the sack, he pulls a dried fish and holds it in front of her face, making it swim through the air. “
Ika,
” he chants. “
I-ka.
”

Hau. Ika. Miro Toki. Mamari. Auke. Karu.
One by one, he waves before her familiar objects, and when his sack is emptied, he points to the crater and says
“Rano.”

“Crater?” Her arms form a basin and she makes the roar of an explosion. “Volcanic crater?”

He nods and pats her proudly on the shoulder.

It soon becomes clear Te Haha is a born teacher, and Elsa guesses she is his first pupil. He is thorough, rigorous, demanding. He shows her every subtlety of the language.

He greets her at sunrise at the campsite, instructs her to sit beside him with her journal open while he slowly names nouns, verbs, prepositions.

And this is how Elsa begins her dictionary, and finally learns the name of the hieroglyphics she is trying to decipher.

They are called
rongorongo.

5th March 1914

I have apparently generated much amusement among Te Haha and his friends through my inquiries into the relations between the sexes. For the purposes of the RGS, it seemed best to determine the preponderance of polygamy on the island and to attain some sense of the general position of women, concerning property & marital rights, etc. I therefore asked the men gathered round our circle how many wives each had, or hoped to have. “O te aha?” (why) they all asked with broad smiles. They could not understand why this was of interest. They pointed to my notebook. Why was I writing this down? (They have had the same reaction to our study of the moai, a general disbelief that anyone would be so interested in the statues they have been looking at every day since infancy.) I therefore thought it best to attempt an explanation, in my still awkward Rapa Nui, of the monogamous habits of our western world, with more than a little suggestion that our arrangements were of a more civilized nature. Well, I might as well have told them I was part monkey! The men all shook with hearty laughter. On pressing the source of this riotous kata, I found
myself
the sudden object of inquiry. Was I not uha to matu’a Edward? Of course, I responded. And was not vi’e Alice also uha to matu’a Edward? The source of their confusion suddenly evident, I set them to a correct understanding of our familial relations. Edward, I explained, had only one wife, and one sister-in-law. They were very disappointed, and a bit confused.

I have decided, however, to postpone further anthropological inquiries and focus primarily on the rongorongo. This is the most important task, as the most reliable information about the tablets is stored within the minds of the island’s elders. Thus far, I have determined that the Rapa Nui believe the original rongorongo symbols were brought to the island by the first settlers, and that they were on some form of paper (probably bark). When the paper was exhausted, they began inscribing on banana plants, and then, finally, wood. It is believed the inscriptions were made with a shark’s tooth. It seems, however, that most of these tablets were burned with the houses during tribal warfare. (There seems to have been a prolonged war between the island’s two main clans—the Hotu Iti and Kotuu—of which I plan to make further inquiries.) As for the inscriptions on the tablets, several middle-aged islanders offered quite eagerly to “read” them for me, but after ten such episodes of entirely different readings, it is clear they are holding the tablets in front of them and reciting random stories. I have not yet made much contact with the eldest members of the population (some are believed to live at the leper colony just outside Hanga Roa), whom I hope will offer the much-needed knowledge of the script.

I have asked what is known of how the island was settled, where the people came from, and when. They have no numerical dates, but they say there have been twenty-seven kings. The first was Hotu Matua, who landed his canoe on the beach at Anakena, the site of our very own camp. They say he came from a group of islands in the direction of the setting sun, and the name of that island was “Marae-toe-hau,” which seems to translate as “the burial place.” They say that Hau Maka, advisor to Hotu Matua, had a dream, and that Hau Maka’s dream soul visited the island, found it to be beautiful and bountiful, and that is why they searched for the new land. If the legend is true, one must wonder if the king Hotu Matua was disappointed in the barren land that he found, if he must not have wondered if he had found the wrongone.

Edward is on the verge of deciding which statue he will first excavate. Each evening, with several lamps burning their new stores of porpoise oil, he sifts through his data. Elsa tries to tempt him with the tablets, holding the wooden slabs before him in their tent, rattling off information—
Now, this one is the only Kohau we’ve found from the caves near Puna Pau, and it’s markedly different from the others. See the repetition of the hunched figure followed by the tree? Quite lovely, I think.

But for the moment the shadow of Edward’s interest falls only on the statues.

“We should begin digging soon,” he says, peeling off another page of notes. “Whatever we find at the base will be essential in understanding the method of transport. That, it seems, should be the thrust of my inquiry.”

When he decides which
moai
to excavate, the logistics consume him. With sufficient barter incentives, he finds a group of islanders willing to help. But preparing the site proves difficult because of the lack of wood.

“There isn’t a single branch on this whole island that could be used for construction,” Edward complains. “It’s amazing, really, that the people here ever managed to make a life.”

Eventually, he decides to dismantle some of their crates for scaffolding.

Once the excavation begins, Edward relaxes again. Each afternoon when he returns from the quarry, and Elsa from her interviews, they share the details of their day, blurry with an invigorating fatigue, already imagining what the next day’s work might hold.

“I think,” Edward says one night after she’s described a particular series of bird images, “you may have found your true calling.”

Between them a kindness, a mutual respect, has arisen. They have become like business partners, talking excitedly over dinner about their work. Their routine is fixed, comfortable, and forged entirely by common interest.

Still, she finds her true companionship in the pages of her books. Her copy of
The Voyage of the Beagle
seems to be gone for good, and she has finished
The Different Forms of Flowers on Plants of the Same Species,
so she returns once again to
On the Origin of Species,
where she finds what seems to be a confession by Darwin:

My work is now nearly finished; but as it will take me two or three more years to complete it, and as my health is far from strong, I have been urged to publish this Abstract. I have more especially been induced to do this, as Mr. Wallace, who is now studying the natural history of the Malay archipelago, has arrived at almost exactly the same general conclusions that I have on the origin of species. Last year he sent to me a memoir on this subject, with a request that I would forward it to Sir Charles Lyell, who sent it to the Linnaean Society, and it is published in the third volume of the Journal of that Society. Sir C. Lyell and Dr. Hooker, who both knew of my work—the latter having read my sketch of 1844—honoured me by thinking it advisable to publish, with Mr. Wallace’s excellent memoir, some brief extracts from my manuscripts.

“Edward,” she says across the tent, “do you know the work of Alfred Wallace?”

“The Malay Archipelago man.”

“Was he working on a theory of evolution at the same time as Darwin?”

“He was, but it’s hard to say whose came first. The Linnaean Society presented their papers at the same time, but Wallace’s got no attention. Darwin was a Cambridge man and Wallace was self-taught, had to finance all his travels by sending insects and stuffed snakes back to England. I suppose he didn’t have much of a chance at being taken as seriously. Then Darwin published his book before Wallace’s, and, of course, Darwin is credited with the theory.”

“Did Wallace need a degree from Cambridge in order to have a theory?”

“Of course not.”

“With that thinking, thousands of England’s best should have discovered evolution.”

“It’s just how these things work, Elsa. Darwin was a man of the establishment, you can’t blame him for that.”

“No blame, I just feel sorry for Wallace.”

“Well, Wallace accepted it. He called his own book on natural selection
Darwinism
. That certainly concedes the discovery.”

“Perhaps he didn’t think he could win the fight.”

“Well, don’t be too hard on either of them. They were both, after all, in search of the truth.”

In these words she hears an echo of her father’s admonitions against her hasty judgments. Edward has, in fact, become very much like her father, or her ease with him has become the same. Even the arrangements of watching Alice take on new simplicity. After Alice’s fits bring one of Elsa’s interviews to a hasty end, Edward offers to take her along to the excavation.

“You must be able to work without interruption, Elsa. It’s simply too important. And at least we know for certain she won’t frighten the statues. I hope you trust that I’m able to look after her.”

She does trust him, after all these months. He is attentive with Alice, has grown accustomed to her outbursts, and Alice seems comfortable with him.

“Of course,” says Elsa. “Of course I trust you.”

One more leash untethered. Now Elsa can move about the island freely—a true explorer, a true scientist—with nothing to divert her from her work.

Elsa throws herself into the island, the language, the
rongorongo
. She can now converse comfortably in Rapa Nui, and Edward even uses her as a translator. She takes copious notes as the islanders share their legends and myths, but they seem to lack an oral history of the
moai
building and their collapse. Elsa suspects the wooden boards might record such history. An account of major events must have been stored somewhere, and if not in the memories of the people, then perhaps on the tablets. But each time the strange glyphs begin to hint at a meaning, they pull back, as though teasing her. And she is beginning to wonder about the wood itself. The tablets are made of a dark and dense wood she has not seen anywhere on the island. Where did it come from? Could the tablets have arrived here from somewhere else? Could they all have been carried in that first canoe with Hotu Matua?

She thinks of Hotu Matua’s long journey, and of their own journey from England. Neither the Polynesian king, nor Edward, nor she, could have known what awaited them on this new shore. It was a place of myth until they arrived. But now her past has become the myth; Max, her father, their house in England—all of it seems an island once dreamed of.

And when Elsa lies in the tent at night, her books piled beside her cot, listening to waves break against the shore, she feels she has done the right thing. She is supposed to be here, on this island. Even now when she sleeps beside Edward, she is content. The languorous weight of his heavy arms, the smell of soap and tobacco rising from his chest—it helps her drift into a delicate sleep. She is growing used to him. And caring for him, being comfortable with him, helps ease her guilt. No longer does she see him as an opportunity to help Alice and herself. She sees him as her husband. Is it really, she thinks, so awful to be loved by this man? He is Edward, dear, sweet Edward. And this—Edward, Alice, this windswept land in the middle of nowhere—is now her life.

15

In her second year of graduate school, after much discussion and debate, Greer chose Thomas as her advisor. They had already made their relationship public, an event that Greer had dreaded—anticipating scorn, distrust, even jealousy—but which, in the end, elicited little more than shrugs from her classmates. Everybody had guessed long ago.

Without question, Thomas was her top choice for advisor. His work was the most interesting in the department; his lab had access to the best equipment and the largest funds. He’d recently been awarded a grant from the American Institute of Biological Sciences, had been honored by the university at a black-tie dinner to which he’d taken Greer, and had been featured in an article in
Life
magazine, “The Science of Today and Tomorrow,” complete with a photograph of him standing in his lab over a two-meter core he and Greer had taken that February from the banks of the Mississippi. But the article bothered Thomas because it divided scientists into two categories—traditionalists and renegades. Thomas, who had just turned forty-three, was put in the traditionalist category, and mention was made of the phenomenon in science of great discoveries being made by the young, alluding to his own early successes: the Linnaeus Prize, the First Palynology Conference. But there was no denying the attention the article brought—the university even added his lab to the campus tour, and sometimes, from his office window, he and Greer would notice a dozen teenagers with their parents gazing up at the building. “They can’t see anything from there,” Greer would complain as she lowered and raised the blinds. “Why not show them some fossil pollen? That’s interesting.” “Because,” said Thomas, “they don’t want to see science, they want to see what they think is celebrity.” He seemed quite pleased with that label, though. Now everybody wanted to work in his lab. Even Jo, who had joined his team that semester. But Greer was conflicted.