platforms of stone, like the paepaes of the Marquesas, only bigger,
and the stones are all fitted together without cement. They built them
on promontories facing the sea. Some are three hundred feet long, and
the walls thirty feet high. On these platforms there were huge stone
gods that have been thrown down; some were thirty-seven feet high,
and they had redstone crowns, ten feet in diameter. There were stone
houses one hundred feet long, with walls five feet thick. How they
moved the stones no one knows, for, of course, these people there
now were not the builders. Some race of whom they knew nothing was
there before them.

"They are one of the greatest mysteries in the world. Easter is the
queerest of all the Maori islands. They had nothing like the other
Maoris had in any of these islands, but they had plenty of stone, their
lances were tipped with obsidian, and they were terrible fighters among
themselves. They had no trees, and so no canoes; and they depended
on driftwood and the hibiscus for weapons. They are all done for now."

Captain Benson was still busied with his log when the steamship from
New Zealand arrived to take the shipwrecked men away. The El Dorado's
boat was stowed carefully on the deck of the liner. I saw the skipper
watching it as the deck-hands put chocks under it and made it fast
against the rolling of the ship. That boat deserved well of him,
for its stanchness had stood between him and the maws of the sharks
many days and nights.

I bade him and the two seamen good-by on the wharf. The old man was
full of his plan to exhibit the boat in a museum and of selling his
account of his adventures to a magazine.