Volume 51, Number 5 · March 25, 2004
Twilight at Easter
By Jared Diamond
The Enigmas of Easter Island
by John Flenley and Paul Bahn
Oxford University Press, 256 pp., $28.00
Among Stone Giants: The Life of Katherine Routledge and Her Remarkable Expedition to Easter Island
by Jo Anne Van Tilburg
Scribner, 351 pp., $27.00
No other site that I have visited made such a ghostly impression on me as did Rano Raraku, the quarry on Easter Island where its famous gigantic stone statues were carved. To begin with, the island is the world's most remote habitable scrap of land, lying far out in the southeastern Pacific Ocean, 2,300 miles west of the coast of Chile and 1,300 miles east of Pitcairn Island. Rano Raraku itself is a volcanic crater six hundred yards in diameter, which I entered by a trail rising steeply up to the crater rim from the plain outside, and then dropping steeply down again toward the marshy lake on the crater floor. No one lives in the vicinity today.
Review, 4560 words
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