The wild guava and the thorny keoho, the taro, the pandanus and the banian, all the familiar and useful trees and plants were left behind.  We toiled onward in a wilderness of stone.

I climbed around the edge of a precipice, and stood above the sea.  The blue ocean, as I looked downward, was directly under my eyes, and I could see the fishing canoes like chips on the water.  It was a thousand feet straight down; the standing-place was but three feet wide, wet and slippery.  The mighty trade-wind swept around the crags and threatened to dislodge me.

That demoniacal impulse to throw oneself from a height took possession of me.  Almost a physical urging of the body, as if some hidden Mephistopheles not only poured into the soul his hellish advice to end your life, but pushed you to the brink.  As never before the evil desire to fall from that terrible height attacked me, and the world became a black dizziness.  Struggling, I threw out my hand; the unconscious grip upon a stunted fern, itself no barrier against falling, gave me a mental grip upon myself, and the crisis was passed.

On hands and knees I crept around the ledge, for the wind was a gale, and a slip of a foot might mean a drop of a fifth of a mile.

The next valley, Tapaatea, came in view, and Hanavave a cleft in the mountains, the stream a silver cord.  A cascade gleamed on the opposite side against the Namana hills.  It is Vaieelui, the youth Orivie informed me, as we went higher, still on the dangerous ledge that binds the seaward precipice.  All the valleys converged to a point, and nothing below was distinct.

Higher we went, and were level with the jagged ridge of the Faeone mountains toward the north, and could look through the pierced mountain, Laputa; through the hole, tehavaiinenao, that is like a round window to the sky, framed in black, about which legends are raised.  Orivie smiled indulgently as I explained to him that that hole was made by sea-currents when Laputa was under the ocean.  He knew that a certain warrior, half god and half man, threw his spear through the mountain once upon a time.

We came then to the veriest pitch of the journey, like the roof of the world, and it was necessary to crawl about another ledge that permitted a perpendicular view of 2500 feet, so desperate in its attraction that had I known the name of that saint who is the patron of alpenstock buyers I would have offered him an ave.  This was the apex.  Once safely past it, the trail went downward to a plateau.

I caught up with Orivie and the horse, and my muscles so rejoiced at the change of motion in descent that almost involuntarily I took a few steps of a jig and uttered the first verses of “I Only Had Fifty Cents.”  Mosses and ferns by the billion covered every foot of the small plateau.  There were no trees.  The trail was a foot deep in water, like an irrigation ditch.  One still might easily break one’s neck.  And I reflected that Pere Olivier crosses many times a year between Oomoa and Hanavave, in his black soutan and on his weary horse, in all weathers, alone; it is a fact to treasure for recalling when one hears all missionaries included in the accusation of selfishness that springs so often to the lips of many men.