Page:A Lady's Cruise in a French Man-of-War.djvu/35

Rh When the corpse had been deposited on this great burial-mound, all the men, women, and children assembled, and sat round in a great circle, bearing large torches made of dried palm-leaves. Six of the principal men then walked several times round and round the place of burial, in sunwise procession, waving the blazing torches on high; finally, these were extinguished and laid on the ground. Then all the people arose and made the sunwise circuit of the royal tombs, as has been done from the earliest days, by men of all nations and colours, and then they, too, extinguished the emblematic torches, and laid them on the earth, in memory of him whose flame of life had passed away for ever from the poor dead clay. This ceremony was repeated on fourteen successive nights.

The mystery in all antiquities of this sort lies in the problem, how a race possessed only of stone adzes could possibly have hewn these huge blocks in the first instance, and how they then transported them on their frail canoes across wide distances of open sea. Tombs of the same character were common to all these groups, and were called marais. They combined the purpose of mausoleums of the chiefs, and of temples where human and other sacrifices were offered.

Some of them were of gigantic dimensions. Captain Cook described one at Paparra in Tahiti, which consisted of an immense pyramid, 267 feet long by 87 wide, standing on a pavement measuring 360 feet by 354. On its summit stood a wooden image of a bird, and a fish carved in stone, representing the creatures especially reverenced by that tribe.

The pyramid was, in fact, a huge cairn of round pebbles, "which, from the regularity of their figure, seem to have been wrought." It was faced with great blocks of white coral, neatly squared and polished, and laid in regular courses, forming eleven great steps, each of which was 4 feet high, so that the height of the pile was 44 feet. Some of these stones were upwards of 3 feet in length and 2½ in width. The pavement on which the pyramid was