We skirted a coast of almost vertical cliffs crowned by cocoas, the faces of the rock black or covered above the waterline with vines and plants, green and luxuriant.  Long stretches of white curtains and huge pictures in curious outlines were painted on the sable cliffs by encrusted salt.  The sea surged in leaping fountains through a thousand blow-holes carved from the black basalt, and the ceaseless wash of the waves had cut the base of the precipices into paniho, or teeth, as the Marquesans say.

There were half a dozen indentations in the bleak and rugged coast, each a little valley guarded by cliffs on both sides, the natural obstacle to neighborliness that made enemies of the clans.  Inhabitants of plains are usually friendly.  Mountains make feuds.

We passed the valley of Hana Ui, inhabited when Grelet came, and full of rich cotton-fields, now a waste with never a soul in it.  We passed Eue, Utea, Tetio, Nanifapoto, Hana Puaea and Mata Utuoa, all empty of the living; graveyards and deserted paepaes.  Thousands made merry in them when the missionaries first recorded their numbers.  Death hung like a cloud over the desolate wilderness of these valleys, over the stern and gloomy cliffs, black and forbidding, carved into monstrous shapes and rimmed with the fantastic patterns made by the unresting sea.

Near Matu Utuoa was a great natural bridge, under which the ocean rushed in swirling currents, foam, and spray.  Turning a shoulder of the cliff, we entered the Bay of Virgins and were confronted with the titanic architecture of Hanavave, Alps in ruins, once coral reefs and now thrust up ten thousand feet above the sea.  Fantastic headlands, massive towers, obelisks, pyramids, and needles were an extravaganza in rock, monstrous and portentous.  Towering structures hewn by water and wind from the basalt mass of the island rose like colossi along the entrance to the bay; beyond, a glimpse of great black battlements framed a huge crater.

A dangerous bay in the lee wind with a bad holding-ground.  We manoeuvered for ten minutes to land, but the shelving beach of black stone with no rim of sand proved a puzzle even to Grelet.  We reached the stones again and again, only to be torn away by the racing tide.  At last we all jumped into the surf and swam ashore, except one man who anchored the whale-boat before following us.

The canoe that had sounded the conch off Oomoa was lying on the shale, and those who had come in it were on the stones cooking breadfruit.  The village, half a dozen rude straw shacks, stretched along a rocky stream.  Beyond it, in a few acres enclosed by a fence, were a tiny church, two wretched wooden cabins, a tumbling kiosk, five or six old men and women squatting on the ground amid a flock of dogs and cats.  This was the Catholic mission, tumbledown and decayed, unpainted for years, overgrown by weeds, marshy and muddy, passing to oblivion like the race to which it ministered.