Before the Trees Disappeared

Easter Island, SOUTH PACIFIC -- That you can now fly here in five hours, several days a week from Santiago, Chile, belies the truth that Easter Island is the most isolated of inhabited places on Earth. The nearest neighbor, Pitcairn -- where the Bounty mutineers settled -- with a population of a mere 48 people, is 1,240 miles to the west. Significantly, it is this preternatural lonesomeness that suggests the answers to two of archaeology's greatest riddles: the giant and eerie stone carvings for

Which the island is renowned, and the ecological disaster that caused a 99% population decline and made Easter Island a poster child for the fate many believe awaits the whole of humanity if we're not careful. Jeremy Hildreth But first, the heads. Archaeologists have inventoried 887 carved figures made between about A.D. 1000 and 1600. These big busts, called moai, are an average of 13 feet tall and are known to islanders as the "living faces."

They represent ancestors and elders. "For us, they are people," one descendent of the natives told me. Perhaps. But for me they are just ancient and alien statues. Their meaning isn't intrinsic at all -- it is abstract, intense and interrogative: I want to sit at their feet and ask questions. I feel these guys know something, and I want to know it too. Gigantic and primitive, the moai provoke not reverence or awe but pure wonder, registered as a definite physical sensation, a kind of cosmic "Huh?"