alling only by small rocks interposed,
feeble obstacles to an avalanche. Beetling precipices overhung the
village. I thought they might fall at any moment, and the Marquesans
recount many such happenings. In Tai-o-hae three hundred natives
were entombed forever by a landslide, and Orivie pointed out the
tracks of such slides, and immense masses of rock in the far depths
below, beside strips of soft soil brought down by the rains.

The wild guava and the thorny _keoho_, the taro, the pandanus and
the banian, all the familiar and useful trees and plants were left
behind. We toiled onward in a wilderness of stone.

I climbed around the edge of a precipice, and stood above the sea.
The blue ocean, as I looked downward, was directly under my eyes,
and I could see the fishing canoes like chips on the water. It was a
thousand feet straight down; the standing-place was but three feet
wide, wet and slippery. The mighty trade-wind swept around the crags
and threatened to dislodge me.

That demoniacal impulse to throw oneself from a height took
possession of me. Almost a physical urging of the body, as if some
hidden Mephistopheles not only poured into the soul his hellish
advice to end your life, but pushed you to the brink. As never
before the evil desire to fall from that terrible height attacked me,
and the world became a black dizziness. Struggling, I threw out my
hand; the unconscious grip upon a stunted fern, itself no barrier
against falling, gave me a mental grip upon myself, and the crisis
was passed.

On hands and knees I crept around the ledge, for the wind was a gale,
and a slip of a foot might mean a drop of a fifth of a mile.

The next valley, Tapaatea, came in view, and Hanavave a cleft in the
mountains, the stream a silver cord. A cascade gleamed on the
opposite side against the Namana hills. It is Vaieelui, the youth
Orivie informed me, as we went higher, still on the dangerous ledge
that binds the seaward precipice. All the valleys converged to a
point, and nothing below was distinct.

Higher we went, and were level with the jagged ridge of the Faeone
mountains toward the north, and could look through the pierced
mountain, Laputa; through the hole, _tehavaiinenao_, that is like a
round window to the sky, framed in black, about which legends are
raised. Orivie smiled indulgently as I explained to him that that
hole was made by sea-currents when Laputa was under the ocean. He
knew that a certain warrior, h