Collapsed - Chapter 2 (Pt. 1)

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Easter Island is the most remote habitable scrap of land in the world. The nearest lands are the coast of Chile 2,300 miles to the east and Polynesia's Pitcairn Islands 1,300 miles to the west.

Rano Raraku is an approximately circular volcanic crater about 600 yards in

diameter, which I entered by a trail rising steeply up to the crater rim from the

low plain outside, and then dropping steeply down again toward the marshy lake

on the crater floor. No one lives in the vicinity today.

Scattered over both the crater's outer and inner walls are 397 stone statues, representing in a stylized way a long-eared legless human male torso, mostly 15 to 20 feet tall but the largest of

them 70 feet tall (taller than the average modern 5-story building), and weighing

from 10 up to 270 tons.

The remains of a transport road can be discerned passing

out of the crater through a notch cut into a low point in its rim, from which three

more transport roads about 25 feet wide radiate north, south, and west for up to

9 miles towards Easter's coasts.

Scattered along the roads are 97 more statues, as if abandoned in transport from the quarry. Along the coast and occasionally inland are about 300 stone platforms, a third of them formerly

supporting or associated with 393 more statues, all of which until a few decades ago were not erect but thrown down, many of them toppled so as to break them deliberately at the neck.

From the crater rim, I could see the nearest and largest platform (called

Ahu Tongariki), whose 15 toppled statues the archaeologist Claudio

Cristino described to me reerecting in 1994 by means of a crane capable of

lifting 55 tons. Even with that modern machinery, the task proved

challenging for Claudio, because Ahu Tongariki's largest statue weighed 88

tons.

Yet Easter Island's prehistoric Polynesian population had owned no

cranes, no wheels, no machines, no metal tools, no draft animals, and no

means other than human muscle power to transport and raise the statues.

The statues remaining at the quarry are in all stages of completion.

 Some are still attached to the bedrock out of which they were being carved, roughed out

but with details of the ears or hands missing. Others are finished, detached, and

lying on the crater slopes below the niche where they had been carved, and still

others had been erected in the crater. The ghostly impression that the quarry

made on me came from my sense of being in a factory, all of whose workers had

suddenly quit for mysterious reasons, thrown down their tools, and stomped out,

leaving each statue in whatever stage it happened to be at the moment.

Littering the ground at the quarry are the stone picks, drills, and hammers with which the

statues were being carved. Around each statue still attached to rock is the trench

in which the carvers stood. Chipped in the rock wall are…

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