nor the rest of his countrymen knew anything about them.

As I gazed upon this monument, doubtless the work of an extinct and
forgotten race, thus buried in the green nook of an island at the end of
the earth, the existence of which was yesterday unknown, a stronger
feeling of awe came over me than if I had stood musing at the mighty base
of the Pyramid of Cheops. There are no inscriptions, no sculpture, no
clue, by which to conjecture its history: nothing but the dumb stones. How
many generations of those majestic trees which overshadow them have grown
and flourished and decayed since first they were erected!

These remains naturally suggest many interesting reflections. They
establish the great age of the island, an opinion which the builders of
theories concerning the creation of the various groups in the South Seas
are not always inclined to admit. For my own part I think it just as
probable that human beings were living in the valleys of the Marquesas
three thousand years ago as that they were inhabiting the land of Egypt.
The origin of the island of Nukuheva cannot be imputed to the coral
insect: for indefatigable as that wonderful creature is, it would be
hardly muscular enough to pile rocks one upon the other more than three
thousand feet above the level of the sea. That the land may have been
thrown up by a submarine volcano is as possible as anything else. No one
can make an affidavit to the contrary, and therefore I will say nothing
against the supposition: indeed, were geologists to assert that the whole
continent of America had in like manner been formed by the simultaneous
explosion of a train of Etnas, laid under the water all the way from the
North Pole to the parallel of Cape Horn, I am the last man in the world to
contradict them.

I have already mentioned that the dwellings of the islanders were almost
invariably built upon massive stone foundations, which they call pi-pis.
The dimensions of these, however, as well as of the stones composing them,
are comparatively small: but there are other and larger erections of a
similar description comprising the "morais," or burying-grounds, and
festival-places, in nearly all the valleys of the island. Some of these
piles are so extensive, and so great a degree of labour and skill must
have been requisite in constructing them, that I can scarcely believe they
were built by the ancestors of the present inhabitants. If indeed they
were, the race has sadly deteri