tino
of the name, the place where it had its origin, was an ancient lagoon-swamp at the foot of the Cashmere Hills, which the river drained. Another version of the Heathcote name is Wai-Mokihi, or “Flax-stalk Raft Creek.” Lower down the Heathcote, where the broad tidal shallows are, the Maoris gave the place an equally appropriate name; they called it O-hikaparuparu, which may be translated as “The spot where So-and-so fell in the mud,” or “Stick-in-the-mud,” which serves equally well to-day. About Redcliffs, where the tramline passes round from the broads and under the great cave-riddled lava precipice, there belongs a rather beautiful name, Rae-Kura, which is more modern than most of the other Native designations. It means “Red-glowing Headland,” or, let us say, “Rosy Point.”
Immeasurably more ancient is Rapanui, which is the name of Shag Rock, in the Estuary; a place-name that could very well be appropriated by some of the near-by residents. It is a far-travelled name, for it was brought by the first Maori immigrants from Hawaiki, just as our white settlers brought their Canterburys and Heathcotes and Avons with them. We find it on the map of the Pacific some thousands of miles away; it is one of the Native names of Easter Island, that strange relic of a drowned Polynesian land in Eastern Oceania. And further out still, there is Tuawera, the Cave Rock at Sumner, to which belongs a legend of love and wizardry and revenge, to be narrated at another time, in which the chief figures were a girl from Akaroa named Hine-ao or “Daughter of the Dawn,” the chief Turaki-po, of “The Outpost” village, and Te Ake, the tohunga of Akaroa.
Chapter III.
ROUND THE SUGARLOAF.
“THE CREST OF THE RAINBOW.”
The saying that the best place to see the mountains is from below, not from their summits, may properly be qualified in its application to our Port Hills by the opinion that the finest view of the craggy range of old volcanic upjuts is that to be had from a few hundred feet below the range crest, on the Lyttelton Harbour side. Really to appreciate the special and peculiar beauty of the hills, with their nippled peaks and crags and their age-weathered cliffs, one must travel along the Lyttelton-Governor’s Bay road rather than view the range from the Plains, where the smoothed and settled ridges, like a series of long whalebacks, give little hint of the sudden rocky wildness of the precipitous dip to the harbour slopes. There, on the white road that curves along the hillsides well above the waters of the Whanga-Raupo, it is easy to understand something of the fiery history of these hills, when the hollow that now is Lyttelton Harbour was one terrific nest of volcanoes and when the tremendous forces of confined steam and gases hurled whole mountain-tops skyward and helped to give savage shape to the walls of rhyolite rock that stand to-day little altered by the passage of the untold centuries of years. Better still, truly to understand this most wonderful part of Canterbury, one should make a traverse of the upper parts of the eastern dip by the new tracks, two or three hundred feet below the pinnacles of the ridge. Off
Te Heru o Kahukura, Sugarloaf.
C. Beken, photo