Easter Island
No memorials of the past are more fantastic than the series of great statues—some of them as tall as a four-storey building—that greet the visitor to this lonely and storm-swept Pacific island. By C.A. Burland.
Twelve hundred miles distant from any other inhabited land, there are fifty-five square miles of volcanic hills covered with black soil and dry grass—an island of grey skies and chilly winds, with beaches swept by a continual swell of great waves from the Pacific. Such is Easter Island, a most unpromising place for human habitation. It is now used as a great sheep ranch, though four hundred natives still live there in a reservation on the slopes of the extinct volcanic peak called Rano Kao.
Once a year a ship reaches the island from Chile, for Easter Island is a Chilean possession. The boat stays for a week or two and then sails away for another year. During its stay, a brisk trade is carried on in carvings and curios made by the natives for sale against such luxuries as fashionable cotton dresses for the women, soap, which is a great treasure among them, and new food-stuffs to add to the normal supplies grown on their plantations, or fished from the cold sea.
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