ps or terraces, each four feet
high, so that the total height of the structure was forty-four feet.
Each step was formed of a single course of white coral stone, neatly
squared and polished. The steps on the long sides were broader than
those at the ends, so that at the top it terminated, not in an oblong of
the same figure as the base, but in a ridge like the roof of a house.
The interior of the pyramid was solid, being filled up with round
pebbles which, from the regularity of their figure, seemed to have been
wrought. Some of the coral stones were very large; one of them was three
and a half feet long by two and a half feet wide. The foundation of the
pyramid was built not of coral, but of what Captain Cook called rock, by
which he probably meant a volcanic stone. These foundation stones were
also squared; one of them measured four feet seven inches by two feet
four inches. "Such a structure," says Captain Cook, "raised without the
assistance of iron tools to shape the stones, or mortar to join them,
struck us with astonishment: it seemed to be as compact and firm as it
could have been made by any workman in Europe, except that the steps
which range along its greatest length are not perfectly strait, but sink
in a kind of hollow in the middle, so that the whole surface, from end
to end, is not a right line, but a curve." All the stones, both rock and
coral, must have been brought from a distance, for there was no quarry
in the neighbourhood. The squaring of these blocks with stone tools
must, as Captain Cook observes, have been a work of incredible labour;
but the polishing of them could have been effected more easily by means
of the sharp coral sand, which is found everywhere on the seashore in
great abundance. On the top of the pyramid, and about the middle, stood
the wooden image of a bird; and near it lay the image of a fish carved
in stone. This great pyramid formed part of one side of a spacious area,
nearly square, which measured three hundred and sixty feet by three
hundred and fifty-four, and was walled in with stone as well as paved
with flat stones in its whole extent. Notwithstanding the pavement,
several trees were growing within the sacred enclosure. About a hundred
yards to the west was another paved area or court, in which were several
small stages raised on wooden pillars about seven feet high. These
stages the natives called _ewattas_. Captain Cook judged them rightly to
be altars, observing that they