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.
It is made up of 33 atolls scattered across the four hemispheres that divide our planet.
The prestigious ufologist Erich von Däniken traveled four decades ago to these “mysterious lost islands” in search of extraterrestrials, and I went there three months ago in search of I don’t know quite what. I guess from a collapse.
Another sinkhole: It is one of the first countries to be swallowed by the oceans as the distant polar ice caps melt. Perhaps this same century, warns 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 who translated the Bible into their language had a problem: the islanders did not have a word for 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 stone facade.
“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 got 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 1950s (of the 20th century), commented Ravouvou, cooking dinner over a slow fire and showing the wooden opener with which they sucked the brains out of the skull to taste.
Kiribati has a different flavor. Just as sweet, but poor, with almost no tourism and no elevations, here it is the ocean that sucks the Republic: the Pacific islands are responsible for only 0.03% of the world’s carbon emissions, but will be the first countries to dive.
We sailed in a small boat to the uninhabited northern tip of Tarawa – the main atoll of the country – to float over an already sunken sand island and walk through the Na’a forest, where the penetration of the ocean is drying up the palm trees.
From the dying forest of Na’a we sailed towards Abaiang Atoll, fifteen nautical miles further north, where seepage from the Pacific has forced the displacement of a village. Their houses, as in all of Kiribati, are made of logs and palm leaves, and they wear sarongs: I almost thought I saw Aurora Bertrana – Ocean Paradises, 1930– tying with a Micronesian.
It was on a beach in this atoll that, out of nowhere, the Neo-Gothic bell tower appeared to us, somewhat abandoned. Dedicated to Our Lady of the Rose, 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 veus, the voices of the prophets. An oceanic bull that seems to have been written by Magalhães himself: “The voices of the prophets, who announced that the Kingdom of God would extend to the point of covering the entire world, is now fully fulfilled…”.
Before the Kingdom of God, however, arrived the Navy. It was in Tarawa that in 1943 the ocean raid against the Japanese, fortified in this atoll, began. Skeletons still continue to appear under the coral soil.
Inside the church, a chastened figure of Our Lady of the Rosary awaited us, with her skin painted brown. Like a brunette crowned with Micronesian flowers and arms outstretched. The Queen of Abaiang Atoll.
Sailing back to Tarawa, a huge creature appeared in the middle of the atolls. Emerging as the tower of Our Lady of the Rosary had emerged: unexpectedly. Only she, the Queen of Abaiang, could have gifted us – wrapped in the ocean – the presence of the sperm whale, also called the sperm whale. The animal with the largest teeth in the world and the animal with the largest brain of all.
It looked like the creature wanted to play with our boat, frail 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. There, the Fijian Chief Udre-Udre would have been happy.
The sperm whale finally raised its tail to the sky and disappeared in a dive: it is the mammal that dives the deepest and the animal that emits the most intense sound.
Arriving at this unfathomable point, an image came to my mind: when everything sinks, only Our Lady of the Rose, the tallest building in Kiribati, will stick 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 I thought of Jules Verne rewriting Mad Max.