Word: wolffe
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...island are many "cultural" objects. There are caves full of bones and weird mural paintings. There are stones carved with phallic symbols and strange pictures (men with wings and birds' feet). Neither the living natives nor modern scholars can read the tantalizing hieroglyphics that remain, but Dr. Wolff makes a desperate attempt. Some of the symbols, he thinks, had their origin in India, 11,000 miles away, more than 5,000 years...
Long-Eared Artists. With affectionate meticulousness, Dr. Wolff retells the island's ancient legends. Most of them, characteristically, have to do with slaughter and gluttonous cannibalism...
Brooding over this bloody scene stood the unearthly stone faces. According to native legends, they were made by a tribe called "the Long-Ears," who were eventually massacred by "the Short-Ears." According to Dr. Wolff's psychological analysis, the statues were set up to protect the souls of the dead, or to protect the volcanoes (symbolizing rebirth) from the spirit of death. The statues were carved in the crater of a volcano. Several, as if just completed, lie there still. Others lie unfinished, as if their long-eared carvers had dropped their crude tools just before being killed...
...Wolff has thought about it long and earnestly (in half a dozen languages); psychological symbols clash in his fact-crammed presentation. Toward the end of the book, as if drugged with an Easter Islander's point of view, he wonders whether the statues really did fly. Maybe the volcano erupted every now & then and blew them...
Mystery lovers can be grateful to the learned Dr. Wolff. With all his painstaking erudition, he has not solved, but has deepened the fascinating mystery of Easter Island...