Bridge for Passing Read Free

canoes and boats to become the tombs of their famous sea captains. Today other men climb to bring down the vessels again and clean them of ancient dust and put them into museums. I was reminded of Norway and the great ships in museums there which also were the tombs of the men of the sea. Here in Hawaii the feat seems incredible because of the smooth steepness of the clifflike mountains.
    It was dark when we went back to the hotel and the evening newspaper carried headlines of a vast earthquake in Chile. I read of the disaster and grieved for those whose lives were lost.
    Chile! I remembered that the Downwind Expedition of the recent International Geophysical Year had carried by ship, in its Pacific under-ocean exploration, a device that, bound to the ocean floor, could measure the heat flow from inner earth to the Pacific floor. On the Easter Island rise the heat flow increased sharply. Easter Island and Sala y Gomez, both Chilean, are the result of this rise. And just off the western coast of Chile itself there is a long deep trench, its bottom sharply narrow, a compensation for the Andes, but produced probably by a creeping river of cold material flowing out from the center of the ocean and pushing its way under the rocky continental mass. A strange silent underworld, this ocean bed, a violent world when catastrophe takes place in the conflict between fire and water, heat and cold.
    Chile seemed far away from the pleasant islands of Hawaii and I turned to the demands of the evening. We were to have dinner in the night club across the street, and thither we went to enjoy Hawaiian food and music and dances. The dances made me laugh again and again. They were not only beautiful—they were also subtle and gay, satires on life. One dance, given ostensibly in memory of the first missionaries, was especially humorous. A lovely slender brown girl came on the stage. She wore a white old-fashioned western dress of embroidered muslin, not a Mother Hubbard but the sort of dress the wife of a missionary might have worn a hundred years ago, high neck, long sleeves, narrowed at the waist, full-skirted to the floor with a ruffled train. The girl was the picture of sweet innocence, her long black hair smoothly combed into a knot at her nape. The only touch of color, except her full red lips, was a scarlet hibiscus flower behind her left ear and this flower made me suspicious. In a few minutes my suspicions were confirmed and I was in helpless laughter. For this girl, this innocent island maiden, enveloped from head to foot in white, performed a dance so fraught with all the wiles of woman enticing man that Eve herself, had she seen it, would have wanted lessons. Within the white encasement the beautiful brown body curved and quivered in sensual joy, not primitive, for such joy is eternal, renewing itself in every generation of man and woman, a dance of love.
    The subdued light of the lanterns fell on the circle of watching faces, each absorbed in its own dream, its private memory or unfulfilled desire. When it was over there was silence, a long sigh, then thunderous applause. The lovely girl smiled and bowed and went away and though we clapped until our palms burned, she would not return.
    The master of ceremonies had prefaced each event with a pleasant rattle of conversation and several times during the evening he had mentioned a tidal wave. He had said, tossing it off as a joke, that perhaps we would all enjoy the excitement of a tidal wave and therefore he had ordered one as an added attraction for the evening. None of us took this seriously until now as we woke again to reality, and he began to prattle again of the tidal wave. Suddenly I heard sharply and clearly what he said. He was not announcing a tidal wave, he was warning us of its approach.
    I rose at once with my companion and left the room and crossed the street to the hotel. There all was confusion. Guests were being sent to the upper floors and streets facing the sea were