When we had been some three and a half months at Mataveri—that is, in the middle of July 1914—we felt that the time had come to begin work on the other end of the island. It must be remembered that our original idea was that six months would probably suffice for the whole inquiry, and in any case we had no intention of staying beyond the period which would allow of _Mana’s_ making a second trip to Chile. We therefore established ourselves at Rano Raraku as the most convenient site. It takes about two hours to ride there from Mataveri. The road is made, like all those in the island, by simply clearing away the stones, but it is wide enough to permit the passage of a wagon. It leads first across the island by the western transverse plain till, at Vaihu, the sea is reached, then runs along the south coast with its low rocks and continuous line of breaking surf. Every step of this part of the way is marked, for those who have eyes to see, with ruined burial-places; many of them strewn with the remains of the statues which have once been erected upon them. As Raraku is approached, there lie by the roadside isolated figures of portentous size, abandoned, it has been thought, in the act of removal from the quarries to the terraces. We grew to know by heart this road, which led from what we termed our “town establishment,” to our “country house,” and have ridden it, together or separately, at all hours and in every weather. We were not infrequently detained by business, at one end or the other, till too late to save the daylight, and after dark it was not easy to keep to the track, even with the help afforded by the sound of the breakers. Our ponies gave us no assistance in the difficulty, for as foals they had run wild with their mothers, and were, therefore, equally happy wandering off among the fields of broken lava. As the “twilight of the dove” gradually changed to the “twilight of the raven,” and the huge figures loomed larger than ever in the gathering gloom, it seemed that, if ever the spirits of the departed revisit their ancient haunts, the ghosts of the old image-makers must be all abroad about their works and places of burial.