This is a story of virgins and cannibals. The renowned ufologist Erich von Däniken traveled four decades ago to these “mysterious lost islands” in search of extraterrestrials, and I traveled three months ago in search of I don't really know what.
It could be a country imagined by Jules Verne.
It has less than thirty kilometers of paved road and an ocean space the size of India. And it is made up of 33 atolls scattered throughout the four hemispheres that divide our planet.
The renowned ufologist Erich von Däniken traveled four decades ago to these “mysterious lost islands” in search of extraterrestrials, and I traveled three months ago in search of I don't really know what. I suppose from a sinking. One more sinking: it is one of the first countries that the oceans will engulf as the distant polar ice melts. Perhaps this century, warn the United Nations.
It is the Republic of Kiribati, coral atolls so flat that their palm forests look like seaweed floating on the Pacific.
So flat that the first missionary to translate the Bible into their language had a problem: the islanders did not have a word to refer to the mountains.
It could be a country imagined by the author of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, but it is real, as real as the unexpected appearance of an imposing neo-Gothic bell tower rising on the beach of one of its atolls, with rows of shells embedded in its façade. stone.
“In Kiribati, unlike Fiji, there has never been cannibalism,” Ian Ravouvou, the king of surfing in Fiji, reassured me, the last stop before flying to Kiribati. Ravouvou managed to get Fiji to pass the world's first surfing law a decade ago, returning the Kuru-Kuru wave to the islanders (they had sold it to the Yankees).
They estimate that during his lifetime, in the 19th century, the Fijian tribal chief Udre-Udre ate between 872 and 999 humans: he holds the Guinness record for “most prolific cannibal.” The last case of anthropophagy in Fiji was in the fifties (of the 20th century), commented Ravouvou, simmering dinner and showing the wooden opener with which they sucked the brain out of the skull.
Kiribati has another flavor. Just as sweet, but poor, with hardly any tourism and no elevation, here it is the ocean that sucks the Republic in: the Pacific islands are responsible for only 0.03% of global carbon emissions, but they will be the first countries to submerge.
We sail in a small boat to the uninhabited northern tip of Tarawa – the country's main atoll – to float over an already sunken sand island and walk through the Na'a forest, where the penetration of the ocean dries up the palm trees.
From the dying Na'a forest we sail towards the Abaiang atoll, fifteen nautical miles further north, where leaks from the Pacific have forced the displacement of a town. Their houses, as in all of Kiribati, are made of palm tree trunks and leaves, and they dress in sarongs: I almost thought I saw Aurora Bertrana – Paradisos oceànics, 1930 – flirting with a Micronesian.
It was on a beach on this atoll where, out of nowhere, the neo-Gothic bell tower appeared to us, somewhat abandoned. Consecrated to Our Lady of the Rosary, the church was built in 1907 by a Belgian priest when this paradise did not have a defined diocese. The definition came in 1966, the year in which Paul VI created the diocese of Tarawa and Nauru through the bull Prophetarum Voices, the voices of the prophets. An oceanic bull that seems to have been written by Magellan himself: “The voices of the prophets, who announced that the Kingdom of God would extend to the point of covering the entire world, are now fully fulfilled…”.
Before the Kingdom of God, however, came the Navy. It was in Tarawa where in 1943 the oceanic onslaught against the Japanese, fortified on the atoll, began. Skeletons are still appearing beneath the coral earth.
Inside the church, a punished figure of Our Lady of the Rosary was waiting for us, with her skin painted brown. Like a Moreneta crowned with Micronesian flowers and open arms. The Queen of Abaiang Atoll.
Sailing back to Tarawa, a huge creature appeared among the atolls. Emerging as the tower of Our Lady of the Rosary had emerged: unexpectedly. Only she, the Queen of Abaiang, could have given us – wrapped in ocean – the presence of the sperm whale, also called the sperm whale. The largest toothed animal in the world and the animal with the largest brain.
It seemed that the creature wanted to play with our boat, fragile next to its body and its Moby Dick look. It was a sperm whale that sank the Essex in 1820, the whaler that inspired Herman Melville's novel. His sailors wandered shipwrecked across the Pacific to an uninhabited island, where they ended up eating each other. The Fijian chief Udre-Udre would have been happy there.
The sperm whale finally raised its tail towards the sky and disappeared in a dive: it is the mammal that dives the deepest and the animal that emits the most intense sound.
At this unfathomable point an image appeared in my mind: when everything sinks, only Our Lady of the Rosary, the tallest building in Kiribati, will stand out of the ocean.
With all the islanders taking refuge in Australia or Fiji, where they have already bought land, their last territory – the one that justifies their economic sovereignty over an oceanic mass the size of India – will be a neo-Gothic tower.
And Jules Verne appeared in my mind rewriting Mad Max.
