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By Root 4186 0

cause for regret, it did not occasion alarm, for the men of Bora Bora were exceptional astronomers. They had developed, from careful observation, a year of 365 days, and they had found that from time to time an extra day was required to keep the seasons aligned. Their ritual life was organized around a moon-month of twenty-nine and a half days, which is the easy way to build a calendar; but their year of twelve months was founded on the sun, which is the right way. They could predict with accuracy the new appearance and subsequent motion or the wandering stars, while the merest glimpse of the moon told them in what phase it stood, for each night of the moon-month bore its own special name, derived from the progress of the moon through its cycle. Men like Tupuna and Teroro even knew, by counting ahead six months, in what constellation the sun stood; so they were prepared, as they sailed north, to lose some of their familiar stars; conversely, they knew that they would come upon new stars, and it was wrth the joy of discovery that they identified the hitherto unseen stars of the north. But in all their wisdom, they were not prepared for what they discovered on the eleventh night.

Having set their course, they were surveying the northern heavens when the old man saw, bobbing above the waves, a new star, not of maximum brightness like the vast beacons of the south--for the voyagers found the northern stars rather disappointing in brilliance in comparison with theirs--but nevertheless an interesting newcomer.

"See how it lies in a direct line from the two stars in Bird-with-a-Long-Neck," Tupuna pointed out, referring to stars which others called the Big Dipper.

At first Teroro could not catch the bright star, for it danced up and down on the horizon, now visible above the waves, now lost Then he saw it, a bright, clean, cold star, well marked in an empty space of the sky. Speaking as a navigator he said, "That would be a strong star to steer by ... when it rises a little higher."

Tupuna observed, "We must watch carefully, the next few nights, to see which pit of heaven it goes into."

So on the twelfth night the two men studied the new guidepost, but as dawn appeared each was afraid to tell the other what he had seen, for each realized that he had stumbled upon an omen of such magnitude that it did not bear speaking of. Each keeping his own counsel, the two astronomers spent the last minutes of darkness watching the new star with an apprehension that bordered upon panic, and when daylight ended their vigil, they licked their dry lips and went to their beds knowing they would not sleep.

It was no more than midaftemoon on the following day when the two men took their positions to study the heavens. "Stars won't be out for many hours," Tupuna said warily.

"I'm watching the sun," Teroro lied, and when Tehani brought him his water and stood smiling by the mast of Tane, her preoccupied husband did not bother to smile back, so she went aft with the women.

Swiftly, at six in the evening, and not lingeringly as at Bora Bora, the sun left the sky and the stars began to appear. There were the Seven Little Eyes, blessing the canoe, and later Three-in-a-Row, now well to the south, and the very bright stars of Tahiti; but what the men watched was only the strange new star. There it was, and for nine hours the two astronomers studied it, unwilling to come to the conclusion that was inescapable. But when they had triangulated the sky in every known way, when they had proved their frightening thesis beyond doubt, they were forced, each working by himself, to the terrifying conclusion.

It was Tupuna who put it into words: "The new star does not move."

"It is fixed," Teroro agreed.

The two men used these words in a new meaning; they had always spoken of the bright wandering stars that moved in and out of the constellations like beautiful girls at a dance; and they had contrasted these with the stars of fixed position; but they realized that in a grand sense the latter also moved, rising out of pits in the east and falling into the pits