About them indeed, notwithstanding their primitive savagery which in its qualities much resembled that of other Polynesians, there was a very curious air of antiquity.

One felt that they had known the older world and its mysteries, though now both were forgotten.

Also their language, which in time we came to speak perfectly, was copious, musical, and expressive in its idioms.
One circumstance I must mention.

In walking about the country I observed all over it enormous holes, some of them measuring as much as a hundred yards across, with a depth of fifty feet or more, and this not on alluvial lands although there traces of them existed also, but in solid rock.

What this rock was I do not know as none of us were geologists, but it seemed to me to partake of the nature of granite.