Time Was A Cheap
p. 30 · Read in the full issue
Commodity In The Old
Pacific
Papeete, Nov. 20.
TIHE time-worn theory that the primitive inhabitants of any area where mega lithic edifices exist were incompetent weaklings, and that the ponderous struc tures could have been erected only by a race of supermen from somewhere else, is again being dusted off and broadcast tp a believing world.
Speed-goaded modern individuals, who have witnessed the megaferric mon strosities completed within the space of months, cannot comprehend that the great, enduring monuments of an earlier age were fashioned by men who had all the time in the world. We have a com paratively recent example of that in the leisurely fabrication of the European cathedrals. • At POnape, in the Carolines, it may have required a year (or two years, or five years) to prepare one of the great basaltic prisms; to build a coral ramp; to slowly move the stone to its appointed place.
This writer has witnessed, at Papeete, the slow elevation of a massive piece of machinery (weighing several tons), from the level of the wharf, its horizontal transport across the bulwark of a steamer and its safe deposit within the hold of the vessel, by less than 50 Tahitians using only wooden blocks and crow-bars.
The idea that the population of the Continent of Mu was required to erect the structures on Ponape and Rusaie, is a trifle absurd.
King Christophe’s fortress on a moun tain in Haiti (on Santo Domingo Island) is a megalithic structure which did not require the entire population of North America for its fabrication.
The regal sons of Ta’aroa—who fought the rearguard battles in Indonesia and retired to found an Empire in the Caro lines—were mighty men of valor. Their ancestors had, probably, seen in India, structures of the pattern they, themselves, erected on Ponape and on Kusaie.
Mr. and Mrs. J. A. Muir, of Suva, Fiji, celebrated their golden wedding anni versary on December 1. Both were born in Lancashire, England, and have been many years in Fiji. Muir’s bookshop and souvenir depot is well known in Suva. Mr.
Muir ran the business personally until recently, when he sold out and retired.