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Updated: May 4, 2025
Wrenched from the drunkard's grip, the steering wheel jerked sharply round. A skidding a crash a cry! Over the roadway, vacant now, floated a tenuous cloud of dust and gasoline-vapor, commingled. In the retaining-wall at the left, a jagged gap appeared. Suddenly, far below, toward the river, a crashing detonation shattered harsh echoes from shore to shore.
They are great builders here in Hiva-oa; I saw in my ride paepaes that no European dry-stone mason could have equalled, the black volcanic stones were laid so justly, the corners were so precise, the levels so true; but the retaining-wall of the new graveyard stood apart, and seemed to be a work of love. The sentiment of honour for the dead is therefore not extinct.
At the same time this has preserved, and even enhanced, the place's wildness, especially the wild flowers and the low-nesting birds. Sometimes a few yards of retaining-wall, never cemented, always laid up dry and with a strong inward batter, had to be put in to avoid smothering the roots of some great tree; for, as everybody knows and nearly everybody forgets, roots, like fishes, must have air.
On the level above, looking down upon its sloping sides, staggered a row of half-drunken shanties with blear-eyed windows, and ragged roofs patched and broken; some hung over on crutches caught under their floor timbers. Sanders lived in one of these cabins, the one nearest the edge of the granite retaining-wall flanking the street crossing.
For the making of this garden a natural nook on the side of the mountain had been enlarged by filling in along its outer edge against a great retaining-wall, built up from a depth of a hundred feet from the slope below; and on the farther side of the plateau thus created, where the path down into the valley went on again, were heavy defensive walls.
When the whistle blew she took down the dinner-pail, filled it with potatoes and the piece of pork hot from the boiling pot, poured the coffee in the tin cup, put on the cover, and, limping to the edge of the retaining-wall, lowered it over by a string to her father. Sanders looked up and waved his hand, and the girl went back to her post at the window.
But when they had gone down about twelve feet, with a trench for a retaining-wall, they discovered that the owners' boring plan was not a trustworthy representation of conditions; the job was going to be a soft-ground proposition.
For some distance the road makes a gradual and rather perilous looking descent along the steep and broken slope on the shady side of the ancient river's great retaining-wall, while that opposite is glorified by the brilliant glow of the afternoon sun, which adds an equal charm to the rich, luxuriant foliage below and the tall stately pines that adorn, without concealing, the grey rock they proudly cling to, or that rises in a protecting rampart three hundred feet higher than the cañon bed, with banners of the long-needled pine waving above to proclaim the perfection of Nature's undisturbed freedom.
She also wrote to Babcock, asking him to stop at her house some morning on his way to the Quarantine Landing, where he was building a retaining-wall; and when he arrived, she took him out to the shed where she kept her heavy derricks.
There is an awfulness about it, too, as if that sheer front of rock were the retaining-wall of a reservoir as deep as the bluffs are high, which had sprung a leak in a thousand places, and might the next instant burst and ingulf the lagoon, and wipe out the pretty island between itself and the river.
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