A sudden gust of wind, worried whispers in the plane, the LAN CHILE Boeing 767 lurches and thumps violently onto the landing strip of Mataveri airport. The strip, which extends across the island, was lengthened by 300 metres to allow for the emergency landing of the American space shuttle. A 7 million dollar investment, wholly financed by the United States. A recent modern fixture - unable to make you forget that landing on Easter Island is coming to meet History. The history of Easter Island. The history of our planet.

There are few tourists in this month of October. The tarmac is wet. After our trek in the thin air of the Andean altiplano, we are given a grim welcome by the spray and the drizzle. In the tiny hall of the airport, Easter Islanders wait for the luggage to unload before offering the newcomers accommodation. Their daily life is organized around the landings of the airplanes. Without a proper harbor, the island relies mostly on two weekly flights for its supplies.

We have covered 3780 km (2360 mi.) since our departure from the Arturo Merino Benitez airport in Santiago. We are in the very middle of the South Pacific Ocean. The closest land is unassuming Pitcairn Island, 1,900 km away (1,200 mi.), making Easter Island the most isolated piece of land in the world. It is a small island: 24 km long (15 mi.), 12 across (7.5 mi.), a total area of 117 km2 (46 sq. mi.).

It is on Easter Day 1722 that Jacob de ROGGEVEEN, a Dutch sailor, discovers this tiny scrap of volcanic land between the South American coast and Tahiti. He calls this speck of land Easter Island (Paasch Eylandt). Its modern Polynesian name is Rapa Nui. Historians think that its original name is Te-Pito-Te-Henua, which means The Navel of the World.

The discovery of Easter Island by the Western world was a black day for its inhabitants: from then on, the history of the island will be nothing but a string of tragedies. Its civilization will narrowly escape total obliteration. It is only towards the middle of the 20th century that the island will gain the immense cultural radiance that it enjoys today. How could an isolated people develop such a rich culture thousands of miles from all land, on an inhospitable piece of volcanic rock?

In the small arrival hall, Easter Islanders scramble to lure tourists to "their" guesthouse. With few customers, accommodation prices are highly negotiable and tumble rapidly from $50 to $25 a night... Some islanders speak English... slow, staid English, shaped, misshaped and weathered by their contact with visitors, just like Martin's English. Martin welcomes us in his home converted to a guesthouse near Mataveri airport. A long-time pilot with the Chilean air force, he decided to come back and settle with his family on the island, where he took part in the digs of Thor Heyerdahl, the great Norwegian archaeologist, noted for having reached Polynesia from Peru on his famous raft, the Kon-Tiki. Since then, Martin receives tourists. He starts out telling us about his island: legend and reality intermix. "Little is known after all of the great statues (Moai), my people have lost their memory". Outside, it rains on. Martin says that October is the start of the dry season and that it should stop raining soon.

The next morning sees our host vindicated: the sun gradually disperses the clouds and we decide to go down to Hanga Roa. The capital of Easter Island is a village: some paved streets, some houses, some shops, some restaurants. The Playa Pea restaurant juts out on a promontory above the sea. It must be a magic place in the evenings when the sun sets over the small bay.

In front of the church, signs are scrawled with nationalist slogans. The Easter Islanders want their island back, stolen they say by the Chilean government. "Give us back our ancestors' land". The tone is set. Inside the church, wooden sculptures with tortured faces. The Christianization of the island is an interesting episode of its history. It is the labour of Brother Eugene Eyraud. A flagstone can still be seen in Hanga Roa cemetery by the ocean near the site of Ahu Tahai, one amongst the finest Moai sites on the island for lovers of photographs taken with the sun setting. The flagstone bears this inscription: "Easter Island to Brother Eugene Eyraud who, from mechanical worker, became God's worker and conquered it for Jesus Christ". Father Eyraud's arrival, life, and death on the island mirrors the decline into which the island had fallen in the middle of the 19th century.

After its discovery in 1722, the island remains forgotten for 50 years. The great travellers of time then come in succession. They name various places on the island: Cook in 1774, La Perouse in 1786. In 1808, the first of a long series of crimes occur. After a bloody battle a US ship, the Nancy, abducts twelve men and ten women to sell them as slaves to seal-hunters. When the ship is more than three days from the island, its captain has the prisoners brought up on the deck and has their chains removed. As soon as they are freed, the prisoners jump into the water and start swimming desperately in all directions. Lifeboats are lowered to try and save them, but they refuse and soon drown.

Eighteen sixty-two was the decisive year in the island's history. The events of that year provide the main explanation why we know so little about the history of the island: oral tradition - the vehicle of culture - was lost after the murder of its holders. At that time, ships were combing the Pacific Ocean in search of cheap labor for the prosperous Peruvian mines of guano, a fertilizer formed of bird droppings, still used by agriculture today. Exhaustion, poor nutrition, and epidemics were decimating the unfortunate labourers on those barren islets baked by the sun. You can still visit those "guano islands" today near Pisco in Peru. Slave traders undertook an expedition to Easter Island, the closest Polynesian island. Among their prisoners were the notables of the island. Within a few months disease, maltreatment and home-sickness reduce the 1000 natives taken into slavery to a bare hundred. The survivors are taken back to the island, but most die on the way. Some fifteen reach home, but they bring the smallpox with them. The island turns into a gigantic mass grave. Famine and internecine wars eventually bring the population down to some 600 people. Most members of the priestly class disappear, taking with them the secrets of the past. The people of the island have lost their collective memory.

The Easter Islanders' Apostle then turns up in the guise of Brother Eyraud. This Frenchman, self-exiled to Argentina so as to pay for his brother's studies for priesthood, is a mechanical worker by trade. The destiny of his brother, a missionary to China, fires up his imagination. On January 2nd, 1864, he lands on the island. Robbed and tormented by the natives, he indefatigably teaches the Bible to an audience who learns little by little the priest's "new magical formulas", which which they feel are "stronger". The Easter Islanders gather to recite the prayers or the answers to the catechism. On August 14th 1868, on the eve of the Assumption, the last unconverted islanders join the Church. A few days later Brother Eyraud is dying. His last words are: "Have they all been baptized?". "All", someone answers. And, like a good craftsman who has completed his work, he goes to sleep for ever to rest on this beach where he was the first European to come to live and die.

We hire Martin's Suzuki Vitara. It is very hard to negotiate a rebate for hiring his car for a long period. That's the price and that's it. There is cheaper, but the documents of those el cheapo 4X4's are never in order, he tells us. Eager to explore the island and its riches, we leave without further ado. What strikes us at the outset are the colours of the landscape. The ocean is deep blue. The mighty billows of the Pacific crash violently against the black cliffs. With a few exceptions (Anakena Bay, for instance), swimming is out of the question, the current is too strong. The island was born from a volcanic eruption some 2 millions years ago. The eruption pushed out of the waters of the Pacific three volcanoes which make up the island: the Puakatiki, Rano Kau, and Maunga Terevaka.

The island enjoys a subtropical climate with two seasons: wet from April to September (May having the most rain) and dry from October to March. Despite the important rainfall which it enjoys, the island lacks a permanent reserve of fresh water. Indeed, rainwater seeps down into the porous undersoil and runs away underground into the sea. The mean temperature is 20C (68F), but the sun burns you like in the Atacama desert: a sun cream is indispensable!

We start our exploring with what people there call "the great tour of the island". Following trails of red volcanic dirt we soon reach the foot of the Rano Raraku volcano, the Moai quarry. Its appearance suggests that quarrying stopped all suddenly. Archaeologists estimate that the quarry was abandoned around 1680. Some one hundred statues are left unfinished and others have been abandoned on the slopes of the mountain. Once hewn out of the rock, they must have been transported to their Ahu (the altar on which the statues stand), sometimes dozens of kilometers away. This question will hound all our stay: how did a people seemingly with so few resources succeed in moving over such great distances those huge block of volcanic rock (the largest Moai is 21 metres tall - 63 feet - and weighs almost 100 tons... but it never left Rano Raraku).

The most diverse hypotheses have been advanced. Some sink into mysticism (the statues would have been moved by the Mana, the spiritual force of tribal chieftains), some into the zany (extraterrestrials would have transported the statues with laser beams), or the rational (incremental movement by rocking and swinging, or rolling on beams). Remains of the statues, however, show no sign of blows or scratching. Given the relative fragility of volcanic tuff, there would remain marks if they had been drawn over kilometers on wooden rollers... Another enigma strikes one's mind: most Moai have been overturned. Only a few sites have been restored by archaeologists. Easter Island traditions attribute the overturning of the statues to internecine wars which ravaged the island at the beginning of the 19th century. Polynesian tradition demanded that victors humiliate the vanquished by laying waste their sanctuaries. The statues which had survived were overturned by Western expeditions. A sorry fate indeed for this small out-of-the-way island.

In 1868 it falls into the hands of a French adventurer, Dutrou-Bornier. In 1888, the island is leased to an English company, Williamson & Balfour, for raising sheep. This is to last until 1953. The island is at last linked to the rest of the world by the opening by LAN CHILE, in 1967, of the Santiago-Rapa Nui - Tahiti line, and by the attendant arrival of modern tourism.

As we make our way back, a military ceremony is taking place near Martin's home. A high-ranking member of the Chilean Navy is presenting a medal to a young officer. A wide grin across his face, his eyes sparkling with pride. Martin tells us that this is a thanksgiving ceremony organized and financed by the United States government to reward the young officer for his heroic rescue of an American couple of holidaymakers. They had gone for a swim in the blue waters of the Pacific Ocean, a hundred metres from the shore, when they were attacked by a shark. They were about to die when the young officer courageously threw himself into the water, snatched them away from the shark, and brought them back on board his patrol boat. He took them immediately to Hanga Roa hospital. The man lost an arm and the woman a leg.

The mysterious charm of the island is working... The sight of the Moai lying prone calls out to us. At night we avidly read the books we brought from Europe. Then we discuss them over, we try to make sense of the archaeologists' diverse theories.

The quarry at Rano Raraku provided the raw material for sculpting, in one piece, the body of the Moai. The Puna Punau crater provided the islanders with the red volcanic stone with which they made the Pukaos, the Moai' head-dresses. They manufactured their tools and weapons with the obsidian from volcano Orito. The statues really took on life when they were given eyes, made of shell and coral, which with they watched the heavens. The slow degradation of the Moai is worrying. Modern techniques allow - with each treatment of the tuff - to delay its erosion by 30 to 50 years. But modern techniques come at a cost which seems hardly bearable by the local economy. Will the Western world wake up and help preserve the remnants of a civilization the roots of which it has helped destroy?

The clouds and the sun throw fleeting shadows onto the barren landscape. Our travels take us to the East point of the island, to the Ahu Tongariki site. Its fifteen colossal statues were thrown down by the 1960 tidal wave. The restoration of the site was completed on May 14th 1995, thanks to the Japanese building company Tadano providing a powerful mobile crane, with which the 15 giants are set up again on their original Ahu.

A path then leads us to Anakena Bay. A white beach with warm peaceful water, lined with coconut palms. It is here that, according to the legend, landed King Hotu Matua, the Founding Father of the original Easter Island civilization: the people of the "Long ears". Then came the people of the "Short ears" who, after lengthy and terrible internecine wars, succeeded in eliminating the people of the "Long ears". That is when the quarry at Rano Raraku may have been abandoned. The appeal of those wars was increased by the banquets of which the main course was provided by the bodies of the enemies. Wasn't man the only large mammal the flesh of which one could taste? Cannibalism disappeared from the island only after the introduction of Christianity. The natives confessed to the missionaries that fingers and toes were the most prized tidbits. Those who had taken part in the meal could legitimately flash their teeth at the victim's relatives saying: "Your flesh is stuck between my teeth".

One of the walls of the temples of Ahu Vinapu strikingly reminds us of the walls of Cuzco in Peru and of Tiahuanaco in Bolivia: its huge stones are locked together to perfection. Parts of the site date from 400 A.D... The resemblance is disconcerting; whereas the greater part of theories proffer a Polynesian origin to the settlement of the island, the existence of that "Incan wall" can make you doubt.

Our nostrils and ears filled with red dust, we reach the site of Orongo, by the edge of the crater of volcano Rano Kau. The site of Orongo is the only vestige of the ceremonial center dedicated to Make Make, Bird-God. Its festival took place every year in July, at the start of the Austral spring. Sea swallows came to nest on one of the three islets off Orongo, Motu Nui. The Elders of the island organized a competition for the quest for the first egg. Having faced impressive cliffs and shark-infested sea, the winner could lay claim to the title of Bird-Man. Considered the incarnation of the god, the Bird-Man became a holy personage. After one year, the magic egg lost its power. Ever since the cult was abandoned it seems that sea swallows no longer lay their eggs on Motu Nui.

In the evening we meet at the Playa Pea restaurant. Menus are far from varied (tuna, chicken or beef with mashed potatoes or fries), but the spot is enchanting. In the distance, power boats unload the innards of a freighter which tries to snare in its masts the gigantic red ball of the setting sun.

Soon we must leave the island and we are sad. Sad to leave, our hearts heavy with the tale of the tragedies of the island. We had met - through the remnants of its civilization - a people exiled who have lived on a barren island lost in the middle of the ocean. One day the Easter Islanders lost faith in their statues. Abandoned by the gods who once led them to land on Anakena beach, and aided by those men from another world they exterminated one another and became a people of cannibals.

As the plane is taxiing, I cannot help thinking of another historical date for Mankind: July 21st 1969. On that day, an American set foot on the moon. The whole world then discovered the spectacular photographs of its planet above the lunar horizon, a thin blue ball lost in the middle of the universe. The dark story of the island teaches us that no civilization is eternal. That is what the great motionless statues seem to whisper to us, their backs to the ocean. If we are not careful, what happened to their fathers could happen to us some day: to be unable to remember our past.