Pecked to death by ducks by Tim Cahill Read Free Book Online Page B

In the distance we heard the nightly concert begin. The coyotes were yipping and baying, howling in the wilderness.

    but it was my impression that he expected to find some cultural correlation between those great staring heads on Easter Island and the ancient stone gods of the Marquesans. These gods, called tikis, can be found in dense groves of coconut and banyan trees, usually atop an overgrown stone terrace, a me'ae, like the one I saw on a hill rising out of the Taaoa valley, near Atuona. It was an impressive ceremonial place that lay just above a rich grove of mangoes, bananas, and coconuts. The terraces were two feet high, one rising above the other, and all were thirty-three feet across. The side walls of large, piled rocks were three to five feet high. The ground had once been tiled with stone so there was not much vegetation, and one had a sense of the place as it must have been.
    Six terraces rose to two short ones that were both about ten inches high. Precisely in the middle of the eighth terrace was the tiki, a squatting, scowling god carved out of a single piece of nearly triangular basalt about five feet high. The face was three times the width of a man's shoulders, and the tiki was almost all face. The arms and legs were tiny, deformed; the eyes were huge, with no pupils; and the mouth was a single angry line. It seemed to have erupted out of the earth in rage and fury.
    Three more terraces rose behind the tiki, and on the last of them there was a huge, gnarled banyan tree whose hanging branches had rooted and grown again so that the tree covered half an acre. The branches and leaves of the tree broke the early afternoon sun so that light fell on the tiki with a strange, gloomy, subaqueous glow.
    In the time before the first Euro-Americans landed, the Marquesans who carved the tikis called themselves the Men. The coconut and breadfruit trees they had brought on the big canoes took root and grew in the volcanic soil of the islands; the pigs and goats prospered. Feasting was a way of life. The men sculpted wood, and they decorated their bodies with elaborate, swirling tattoos.
    They lived in the drainage basins, along the rivers that fell from peaks three thousand and four thousand feet high. Each village had its sorcerer, and there was warfare between villages; there was human sacrifice and ritual cannibalism.

    43 * THE UNNATURAL WORLD
    In 1595 Alvaro de Mendana landed on Hiva Oa and named the islands for the Marquesa de Mendoza. America occupied the islands briefly in 1813, but President Madison wasn't interested in such a remote colony. In 1842 France declared that the Marquesas were a part of its empire. Catholic missionaries from that country set about to eliminate what they saw as promiscuity and to destroy the old religion of the stone gods. In this they were aided by diseases brought on the big ships. Of an estimated fifty thousand Marquesans in the eighteenth century, only five thousand descendants survived in 1900.
    Today there are about six thousand Marquesans on six inhabited islands. Nuku Hiva is the northern administrative center, and Hiva Oa the southern. The culture of the Men is no more, but relics of the past litter the drainage basins and stone gods squat in the gloom.
    Edmundo had come to document the tikis. He would measure them and photograph them; he would preserve what he could, and in a way, the culture of the Men would live through Edmundo. Many Marquesans advise travelers to avoid the tikis: They speak of a malevolent power. There were at least twenty-five of them in the Puamau Valley. I was supposed to meet Edmundo there for a bit of exploration. And now he was dead.
    I was, frankly, spooked. The air was heavy with the scent of mangoes and the sun was heavy on my back, but I found myself shivering in a gentle sea breeze. In the distance I could see the mayor's son galloping again along the beach in my direction. He pulled his horse to a halt beside me and shouted, "Edmundo is