The 30 Most Curious World Mystery Stories for Primary School Students

Author: Jidu Heng
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-08-01
Features: A beautiful island destroyed by civilization, about 10,000 years ago, people living in Southeast Asia embarked on a long journey in search of new habitats, riding wooden rafts toward the rising sun. It wasn’t until about 2,500 years ago that the descendants of the explorers arrived on a small island in the South Pacific. Seeing the beautiful island, everyone was overjoyed and cheered. The island was covered in dense forests, and at the foot of a volcano in the middle of the island, there was a vast plain. People scattered across the island began to clear land, grow crops, and raise livestock. Since the island’s soil was already very fertile, the settlers reaped bountiful harvests year after year, and people felt quite content with the sweet life on the island.
As their lives grew increasingly prosperous, the population on the island also grew rapidly. At that time, there were two types of people living on the island: the big-eared people and the small-eared people. The big-eared people, being strong and robust, often gave orders to the small-eared people and always held the upper hand, gradually becoming the ruling class. Seeing that their lives were already quite good, the big-eared people began to boast of their greatness. The island had many large rocks, and the big-eared people wanted to carve their own heads onto these rocks and then erect the statues at the highest point of the island and along the coast to show their greatness to outsiders and passing ships. So, the big-eared people forced the small-eared people, who had fallen into slavery, to carve statues of the big-eared people.
The small-eared people mined rocks from the volcano on the island and began to carve the statues of the big-eared people using their homemade stone axes and stone hammers. One by one, the statues were carved, but moving the huge statues became another challenge. The clever small-eared people came up with a brilliant idea. They felled countless trees on the island and placed them on the roads, then placed the statues on top of the logs and tightly secured them with strong vines from the island. With the combined effort of dozens of people, the heavy statues (hundreds of tons in weight) slowly moved.
More and more statues appeared on the island. These statues had large and long ears, high and prominent noses, deep-set eyes, and looked both majestic and mysterious. But from some day, the peaceful life on the island began to change subtly. With the growing population, food on the isolated island in the middle of the South Pacific started to become scarce. The more scarce the food, the more the big-eared people grew arrogant in bullying and exploiting the small-eared people. In the face of unbearable oppression, the small-eared people rose up in rebellion. The rebellion was a great success, and the small-eared people grabbed their weapons and completely destroyed the statues of the big-eared people, which they had carved with their blood and sweat.
From then on, countless bloody battles broke out between the big-eared and small-eared people. After each battle, the victors cruelly killed the men of the defeated and even ate their flesh. In 1722, Dutch Admiral Jacob Roggeveen discovered this desolate island in the South Pacific, not far from Chile. When Roggeveen landed on the island, he was stunned by the sight before him. In the south of the island, he saw the remains of a massive stone wall, behind which stood hundreds of statues. They faced the sea, arranged neatly along the coast. The stone figures had vivid facial expressions—some were serene and dignified, some glared fiercely, some seemed to be deep in thought, and others had fierce, menacing expressions. All the statues had long earlobes. Roggeveen discovered over 500 finished statues and more than 150 unfinished ones. He also found stone chisels, stone axes, and stone hammers—clearly the primitive tools used for carving at that time.
On the desolate island, only the statues stood silently, as if telling the heartbreaking history of the island. P25-27