The coastal winds whipped across my face as I craned my neck to see the 15 moai before me. Standing up to two storeys tall and with their backs to the choppy Pacific Ocean, the statues' empty eye sockets, once embellished with white coral and red scoria, gazed perennially across Easter Island. Their bodies were etched with enigmatic symbols, and their faces, with prominent brows and elongated noses, seemed both comfortingly human and formidably divine.
