Certainly it was not coral like that on and about the coast, but of a primeval formation.
When I asked Marama what caused these holes, he only shrugged his shoulders and said he did not know, but their fathers had declared that they were made by stones falling from heaven.

This, of course, suggested meteorites to my mind.

I submitted the idea to Bickley, who, in one of his rare intervals of leisure, came with me to make an examination.
"If they were meteorites," he said, "of which a shower struck the earth in some past geological age, all life must have been destroyed by them and their remains ought to exist at the bottom of the holes.

To me they look more like the effect of high explosives, but that, of course, is impossible, though I don't know what else could have caused such craters." Then he went back to his work, for nothing that had to do with antiquity interested Bickley very much.

The present and its problems were enough for him, he would say, who neither had lived in the past nor expected to have any share in the future.
As I remained curious I made an opportunity to scramble to the bottom of one of these craters, taking with me some of the natives with their wooden tools.