The Reef We Were Not Supposed To Cross
I need to say, because I have tried to be honest about the sequence, that what I have described in the previous chapter was not the whole of it.
The approach Rahiti brought us in on was not the only approach. It was the one the island offered us. There was, on the eastern side of the atoll, a second reef break — a natural pass into a secondary lagoon formed by an inner reef structure, a lagoon within a lagoon, which the charts of no century have ever shown. The *fare* on the western beach, where the three figures were waiting, sat at the anchorage the islanders used for boats, and was the place where visitors were received. The inner lagoon on the east side was the place where the business of the island had historically been conducted, and where, I now know, the book Teva had described was kept.
The inner lagoon was closed to us.
This was made clear to us in the first half-hour of our landing, without drama, by a woman named Maruia Nohopae who had walked out from the *fare* to meet us and who introduced herself as the senior of the three. She was in her late sixties, small, grey-haired, with hands that had worked mother-of-pearl and rope for fifty years. She was not a chief. The island did not have a chief in the sense Napuka did. She was the senior of the three families that were currently in residence on the island — for Isla Verde, I learned, was not continuously