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But why were the red hats put on the strange statues at all? So far I have not found a convincing explanation in the whole of the literature about Easter Island. So I ask myself the following questions: statues? Are they meant to express the same thing that 'helmets' and ‘haloes' express on prehistoric cliffs and cave walls all over the world? When the first white men visited Easter Island, inscribed wooden tablets still hung from the necks of the Moais, but even these first curious arrivals could not find a single islander who knew how to read the writing. So far the few wooden tablets still extant have not yielded up their secrets. Nevertheless, they are proof that the Rapanui of the past knew a script, which, I may mention in passing, is astonishingly like Chinese. The generations who came after the 'visit of the gods' forgot what the others had learnt. Letters and inexplicable symbols are also found on the Petroglyphs, the large flat stones with writing and drawings that lie scattered about on the beach like carpets. Many of these torn and fissured stones have surface areas of 24 sq yards. They lie about wherever the ground is reasonably level. On them we found fish, indefinable embryonic beings, sun symbols, balls and stars. To make the drawings clearer to us, Mayor Ropo went over the lines with chalk. I asked him if anyone knew how to interpret the signs. No, he said; even his father and grandfather had not been able to tell him anything about them. He himself thought that the petroglyphs contained astronomical data. He said that all the temples on the island had also been aligned according to the sun and the constellations. Then our excursion to Easter Island paid a special dividend. Mayor Ropo took us to the beach and showed us a stone egg of astonishing proportions. While we walked round the stone relic, he explained that in Rapanui tradition this egg had originally lain in the centre of the Temple of the Sun, for the 'gods' had come to them from an egg. (Discovered at Easter, 1722, the least Easter Island could do was to produce an Easter egg as a surprise for us.) I gratefully added this information to my files on strange stone eggs all over the world. A few yards away from the army of fallen statues, the artificial egg crumbles away on the shore of the island. Only a white catalogue number differentiates the 'egg of the gods' from the hotch-potch of stones on the beach. Had the islanders seen 'gods' with helmets and remembered the fact when it came to making the Was that the reason why the statues did not seem complete to them without the hat-helmets?