The books in this section are usually hardcover and in decent shape, though we'll sometimes offer hard-to-find books in lesser condition at a reduced price. Though we often put images of the book with their original dust jackets, the copies here won't always (or even often) have them. If that is important to you, please call ahead or say so in the order comments!
Eight years after his famed Kon-Tiki raft expedition, Thor Heyerdahl returned to the Southeast Pacific to solve the mysteries of Easter Island. Who carved the giant stone statues that have puzzled experts for over a century? When? How were these fifty-ton statues transported by a primitive race who presumably possessed no mechanical skills, miles from the quarry where they originated? What toppled them over, so that they now lie strewn along the heights and plains of this tiny island in the Pacific?
Thor Heyerdahl soon discovered that the island's mysteries went far beyond its famous statues. For in dozens of secret caves scattered over the island—some of them refuges from some unknown, long-departed invader—lay other objects: carvings of skulls and strange beasts and human masks, and the rongo-rongo boards with their inscriptions which had long defied deciphering, each bearing clues to the skills and customs of an earlier people.
Before the author's expedition no scientist had been able to penetrate the natives' all-powerful taboos. But "Señor Kon-Tiki's" fame had preceeded him: to the superstition-ridden natives he was a mighty ancestor returned from the days of their island's greatness. Month by month the legend of his personal "guardian spirit"—his aku-aku—grew, until at last he gained the natives' confidence and they revealed to him the entrances to their family caves.
Bit by bit the pieces of the puzzle fall into place: the origin of the statues, the secrets of the caves, the story of the ancient stone-carving "long-ears" with their pale skin and red hair, the cannibalism and the civil wars that the islanders endured. Filled with color and excitement, the book transports you into the midst of a human drama of extraordinary interest. You follow Thor Heyerdahl's hazardous explorations across tortuous cliffs and into the bowels of the earth, through passages hardly large enough to admit a human body and you meet the strange, suspicious natives who inherited the closely guarded secrets of their ancestors.
—from the dust jacket
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