lso they had several strange
customs of which they did not know the origin. My own opinion, which
Bickley shared, was that they were in fact a shrunken and deteriorated
remnant of some high race now coming to its end through age and
inter-breeding. About them indeed, notwithstanding their primitive
savagery which in its qualities much resembled that of other
Polynesians, there was a very curious air of antiquity. One felt that
they had known the older world and its mysteries, though now both
were forgotten. Also their language, which in time we came to speak
perfectly, was copious, musical, and expressive in its idioms.

One circumstance I must mention. In walking about the country I observed
all over it enormous holes, some of them measuring as much as a hundred
yards across, with a depth of fifty feet or more, and this not on
alluvial lands although there traces of them existed also, but in solid
rock. What this rock was I do not know as none of us were geologists,
but it seemed to me to partake of the nature of granite. Certainly
it was not coral like that on and about the coast, but of a primeval
formation.

When I asked Marama what caused these holes, he only shrugged his
shoulders and said he did not know, but their fathers had declared that
they were made by stones falling from heaven. This, of course, suggested
meteorites to my mind. I submitted the idea to Bickley, who, in one of
his rare intervals of leisure, came with me to make an examination.

"If they were meteorites," he said, "of which a shower struck the earth
in some past geological age, all life must have been destroyed by them
and their remains ought to exist at the bottom of the holes. To me they
look more like the effect of high explosives, but that, of course,
is impossible, though I don't know what else could have caused such
craters."

Then he went back to his work, for nothing that had to do with antiquity
interested Bickley very much. The present and its problems were enough
for him, he would say, who neither had lived in the past nor expected to
have any share in the future.

As I remained curious I made an opportunity to scramble to the bottom
of one of these craters, taking with me some of the natives with their
wooden tools. Here I found a good deal of soil either washed down from
the surface or resulting from the decomposition of the rock, though
oddly enough in it nothing grew. I directed them to dig. After a while
to my astonishme