Word: easterly
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...scene is set in a Greek village that has grown rich and careful under the tolerant Turkish dominion. As the story begins, everybody in town crowds into the tiny church to hear the priest appoint the leading parts in a Passion play,* to be presented on the following Easter. The choices are almost too shrewd. Mary Magdalen is the village whore. Judas is a well-known hell raiser and general bad lot. St. Peter is the village postman. St. John is the gentle, warmhearted son of the richest man in town. Christ is a shepherd, a stammering...
...there was no place to go. If Chiby got a kick out of anything, it was singing. She sang her earliest solo at 3½, when she visited a Sunday-school class one Easter and laced into White Lilies with such gusto that the rest of the kids quit to let her go it alone. To everyone in town, Chiby seemed like just another American kid; people began to call her "Pat." At a "couple of county things" she stopped the show with her unbridled rendition of I Am an American...
Salted Caves. Norway's Heyerdahl got on famously with the native leaders, who claimed descent from the last surviving "long-eared" statue builder-the rest had been slaughtered, they said, by "short-eared" Polynesian invaders centuries ago. Easter Island's Mayor Pedro Atan demonstrated how the statues might have been raised on their platforms by having a crew of eleven men gradually pry up a fallen idol with poles, and then insert rocks under it until it could be lifted to its feet. It took 18 days. Convinced that the mayor possessed a secret handed down through...
Soon, other Easter islanders were rushing to Heyerdahl with the contents of their "secret" ancestral caves-small stone skulls and images, artifacts and wood carvings-which he excitedly declares "were entirely different from all ancient and modern art hitherto known from Easter Island." Heyerdahl became an initiate of sacred rites. He crept round the island at night, eating chickens buried according to formula in earth ovens, muttering incantations to placate hostile aku-akus, shouting out ritual invocations such as: "Wizard Juan, stand up for good luck!" Only slowly did it dawn on Heyerdahl that the natives might be hipsters...
...Armchair. Despite these body checks, Heyerdahl is convinced that he has found additional evidence that the Easter Island image makers were originally seafarers from Peru. One reason: ancient Peru was known for megalithic structures not unlike those on Easter Island. The book-translated from Norwegian into chatty, slapdash English-has travelogue overtones of mystery and menace that seldom seem justified by the events described. Perhaps the Easter islanders were a shade too hip for the Western visitors, but they still provide a good story for armchair archaeologists...