Easter Island (38 page)

Greer suspected that her emerging picture of the island’s early flora could help him. At the middle levels of her cores, she had found pollen of the
Triumfetta semitriloba,
the tree widespread across the Pacific that was used to make rope. If ropes had moved the statues, she told Burke-Jones, they probably would have been made from the bark of this plant.

“It still grows in Tahiti,” she said from the doorway of his lab. He was uneasy with visitors, so Greer never crossed the threshold. “We could have some sent. I’m sure you could get SAAS to pitch in. Talk to Isabel.”

He pushed his chair back and surveyed his dioramas. “I do think they used something soft, something fibrous.”

“Well, let’s get some shipped, then. And we can all help with the weaving. How much do you need?”

Burke-Jones stared straight ahead, as though reading calculations in the air. “One hundred and seventy-eight yards.”

“Let’s say two hundred.”

“Twenty-two yards will go to waste.”

“We’ll find a use for them. If worse comes to worst, we’ll make a
semitriloba
hammock for future SAAS researchers. Shall I write the forest service on Tahiti?”

“I’d like the simulation to be as accurate as possible.”

“Then let’s have genuine
semitriloba
rope.”

He turned to her with a small smile. “That is something to be happy about.”

“It certainly is, Randolph.”

Other plants as well were emerging from the island’s past.

Pollen from the
Sophora toromiro
tree, similar to a Japanese pagoda tree, appeared in cores from all three craters. The
Sophora
genus was known for its bell-shaped calyxes, white and yellow flowers, pinnate leaves. The
Sophora toromiro
was undoubtedly the small tree noted by Captain Cook:
Only two or three shrubs were seen. The leaf and seed of one (called by the natives Torromedo) were not much unlike those of common vetch . . .
The
toromiro
, then, had outlived all its botanical peers.

Other pollen types appeared only in the cores’ upper levels: pollen almost identical to
Broussonetia papyrifera
, the mulberry trees whose bark fibers were used to make paper, and like the mulberry used throughout Polynesia for making tapa cloth. Again, Cook had observed:
in several places the Otaheitean cloth plant, but it was poor and weak, and not above two and a half feet at most . . .
The mulberry’s pollen, however, was absent from the lowest sediment levels, suggesting it had arrived with the first settlers.

At the lowest levels, the pollen record shifted drastically. Here were spores of at least ten different Pteridophtya, including the expected ferns.

Most interesting, though, was an unknown pollen type clogging the bottom of the cores—oblong grains with a large depression bisecting the center. Whatever this angiosperm was, it had once blanketed the island and had been extinct for several hundred years, the pollen beginning to thin out just as the paper mulberry appeared. Greer would have to send a sample to Kew to see if they had anything similar—but the chances were slim. If this plant had been on the island for thousands of years, it was so far removed from its ancestors that its genealogy would be hard to trace.

And still, the question of wood lingered. Roggeveen and Cook had mentioned canoes with long planks—but neither the
Sophora toromiro
nor paper mulberry trunks could suffice for boat building. Was the pollen at the lowest levels from a large heavy-wood tree?

The Frenchman Jean-François de Galaup, Comte de La Pérouse, visiting the island in 1786, also made note of the canoes:

They are composed only of very narrow planks, four or five feet long, and at most can carry but four men. I have seen three of them in this part of the island, and I should not be much surprised, if in a short time, for want of wood, there should not be a single one remaining here . . .

The exactness with which they measured the ship showed that they had not been inattentive spectators of our arts; they examined our cables, anchors, compass, and wheel, and they returned the next day with a cord to take the measure over again . . .

Monsieur de Langle, La Pérouse’s companion, who made his way inland, observed shrubs of paper mulberry and mimosa, remarking that only one tenth of the island was cultivated, the rest covered with coarse grass. The only birds sighted by Monsieur de Langle were terns at the bottom of the crater. The statues seen through his telescopes had all fallen. None of this, thought Greer, differed from previous travelogues.

What struck her, however, was that Langle and La Pérouse both assumed the island had once hosted different vegetation. Langle estimated the island’s human population at two thousand and added:
There is reason to think that the population was more considerable when the island was better wooded.
La Pérouse even accused the Rapa Nui of deforestation. He complained of the lava rocks strewn across the land, explaining:

. . . these stones, which we found so troublesome in walking, are of great use, by contributing to the freshness and moisture of the ground, and partly supply the want of salutary shade of the trees which the inhabitants were so imprudent as to cut down, in times, no doubt, very remote, by which their country lies fully exposed to the rays of the sun, and is destitute of running springs and streams . . .

. . . M. de Langle and myself had no doubt that this people owed the misfortune of their situation to the imprudence of their ancestors . . .

Greer was reading this one evening in the main room of the
residencial
when Mahina came in.

“
Iorana, Doctora!
” She cradled several cans of peaches. “Look.
Peti
.” She set the cans, one at a time, on the edge of her desk. “Ramon give us
peti
.”

“Iorana,
Mahina.”

She glanced down at Greer’s book. “The
doctora
always work.”

“I know. Another European travelogue of Easter Island. Do you know about any tree stories in the island legends? Trees that once grew here? When Hotu Matua came?”

“I’ve already told you the story of Hau Maka, and of the dream soul who flew toward the sun and found the most beautiful island.”

“In that story, were there trees?”

“There was everything.” She sat behind her desk. “The fish and the fruit and the flowers. The dream soul sees everything she desires.”

“La Pérouse says that the islanders cut trees down. And I’ve found a strange pollen type in my cores, at the lowest level, and I’m wondering if there’s anything in the oral tradition about trees.”

“There is one story I heard as a child, but it is only legend, as you say. It is not for your science.”

“Try me.”

“Well, it is the story of how the big tree came to be. There was a woman, Sina, who loved the man Tuna, but she could not have him. Forbidden. She had many other men, suitors, you say, and the suitors came together to capture Tuna in a big net. The night before they kill him, Sina came to see him, to say
iorana
, and Tuna says the next morning she must plant his head in the ground and it will grow a large tree that will remind her of him.”

Greer wrote this down, and Mahina examined it to make sure it followed her account. It was the same motif that appeared in every mythology—the tree-spirit, the Maypole, tales of death and regeneration, sacrifice and growth. Human life was always bound to plant life. In Australia and the Philippines, trees were thought to hold the spirits of dead ancestors. The Russian Kostrubonku and Indian Kangara held funerals for dead vegetation. According to Norse myth, Odin created the first man and woman from two logs he found by the shore.

These stories tried to explain the world, to make sense of the wilderness that surrounded primitive people. Why tell a story of a large tree when none grew?

“It is make-believe,” said Mahina.

“Vegetation myth,” said Greer. “But useful.”

“Myth,” repeated Mahina. “Because we have no big trees here.” She walked over to Greer and examined the first few pages of the book. “La Pérouse. Yes, it is good.”

“A lot of pages wasted complaining of stolen hats.”

“Hats?”

“
Hau,
” said Greer, pointing to her head. “Every travel account so far describes an almost obsessive theft of hats. The islanders seemed to like them.”

Mahina pondered this for a moment.

“Maybe,” she said, “they need the shade.”

It was the first week of November, summer, but gray clouds hung overhead all morning. The crowd stared expectantly at the sky, hoping that if it rained, it would at least begin soon, before they rolled back their sleeves, wrapped their hands around the fibrous rope, and began dragging the
moai
down the hill.

Burke-Jones, dressed in safari gear, stood over a diorama on the hood of his Jeep. He had assigned each small figure a number correlating to one of the fifty life-size humans awaiting his instructions.

There was a great excitement in the air; Greer could feel it. For the past week everybody had been talking about this day. Burke-Jones’s announcement at the conference had, in fact, catalyzed the island. Almost one hundred islanders were now milling about the grassy slopes of Rano Raraku, the
moai
quarry, waiting to see how their ancestors had done it. For Burke-Jones, for Vicente, even for Greer, this was a scientific experiment. But for the Rapa Nui this was not a fact to be filed away, this was their heritage, the epic of their ancestors.

The logistics, however, were daunting. The fifty volunteers first had to stand in a long line that snaked through dozens of fallen
moai
as Burke-Jones handed each one a numbered placard on a necklace of string. He then called people over in groups of five, and showed them on his diorama where to stand. When her group was called, Greer was surprised to see that Burke-Jones had included himself—a small toothpick figure beside a red matchbox Jeep in exactly the position he was standing. She was relieved to know there were researchers more obsessive than she was. He had assigned each group a team leader—toothpicks with red tips. Theirs was Sven.

“Oh, no,” said Vicente, sporting a number “34” placard over his tan shirt. He had rolled up the sleeves, and was wearing khaki shorts rather than his usual pants.

“It’s about time I got some respect,” said Sven.

“There is always room for a coup.” Vicente winked. “It’s in my blood.”

Burke-Jones looked up from the diorama. “Pay very close attention to where you are supposed to stand.” He pointed to a row of toothpick figures. “Team two takes up the middle row on the statue’s northern side.”

Sven turned to Greer and Vicente. “I’ve been informed that team two will take up position on the statue’s—”

“It’s hot, Sven,” Greer said.

“You see how my subordinates speak to me?” Sven asked Burke-Jones.

“What we won’t put ourselves through for science,” sighed Vicente.

Burke-Jones stared fixedly at his diorama. “You have your assignments,” he said. “Team three!”

“Good luck, Randolph,” Greer said.

“Promptly, please!”

The volunteers were clearly put out by this rigid show of authority. Teams three and four walked away from the Jeep disgruntled, and Sven eventually gave up on his own game, threw his arm around Burke-Jones, and said: “No society, no matter how advanced, could have been as organized as you. Let’s get started with the shimmying.” But Burke-Jones would not be swayed from his agenda.

It took over an hour, but soon everyone had a number, knew where to stand, and had been assigned a group leader. Vicente, who had brought a camera, took shots of Burke-Jones as he delegated and pointed and examined his diorama, and as he then compared it, with a look of amazement, to the scene before him. It was remarkable, thought Greer: on one hillside, three orders of magnitude. The toothpick people, the life-size volunteers, and above them, on the crater, flat on its back, a twenty-foot stone giant to be hauled down the hill to loom above everything.

As things were about to start, Vicente turned his camera over to Mahina, asking her to document the experiment. She stood off to the side with dozens of islanders, the older and meeker who had come to watch. Greer was one of only two women who would be pulling, and she had had to fight Burke-Jones for the chance. He wanted to replicate the historic conditions, and it was a near certainty women hadn’t helped move the
moai.
Vicente finally persuaded him she couldn’t hinder the results. He had pointed to Sven across the dinner table: “Let’s face it. They certainly didn’t have Swedes to help, or British architects to coordinate.”

Isabel, who had stayed on for the experiment, stood by Mahina in pink culottes and white tennis shoes, her arms crossed. Every few minutes she dipped her head, inched her sunglasses down the bridge of her nose, scanned the volunteers, Sven in particular, and then tapped her glasses back into place.

“Positions!” called Burke-Jones, and the crowd approached the supine statue. A web of ropes, handmade from the
Triumfetta semitriloba
trees flown in from Tahiti, had been lashed around its neck. For the past several nights, Greer and Sven and Vicente had gathered at the Residencial Ao Popohanga, where Mahina taught them and several of her friends to weave the fibers. They had made over two hundred yards of rope, which now hung in loose lines about the statue like locks of hair.