HOW THE SACRED FIRE CAME TO WITCH HILL.
As we travel northward along the Summit Track from the Poho-o-Tamatea, observing from this commanding height—a thousand feet above little Rapaki village, lying in its grassy nest below—how that great spearhead of rock has in reality an almost level top, we come to a remarkable broken wall of grey lava moss-crusted and shrub-tufted, protruding from the grassy flanks of the craggy knoll called Witch Hill. It is in fact a huge dyke of once-molten lava, cutting wall-like through the old lava flows and trending southward across the shoulder of its parent hill. From the very crest of the range it shoots in a palisade of frost-shattered rock, towering thirty feet and more in places above the stone-strewn tussocks, and it stretches some distance in irregular cyclopean steps down the steep slope towards Rapaki. There is an old stone quarry on the face of Witch Hill, where this dyke juts out like a broken castle wall of the Patu-paiarehe , the Dim People of long ago, and just there the old waggon track goes down over the smoothed-out hills to the Canterbury Plains and the green banks of the Opaawaho.
Witch Hill.
The Giants’ Causeway some fanciful pakeha has named this wall of lava. To the Maori it is the “Ahi-a-Tamatea” or “the Fire of Tamatea”, and a strange nature legend there is thereto; a folk tale in which fable and geologic myth are curiously blended. It is a volcano myth which closely resembles, and is no doubt a copy of, the North Island legend of Ngatoro-i-Rangi and the origin of the Ngauruhoe volcano. The march downhill of this curious upstanding dyke of lava, grey against the more sombre tints of the range, may be traced in the masses of lava boulders through which the Rapaki water-course has cut its way in its lustier days. And if you turn your face southward and look far across the upper part of the harbour, near the western slopes of Mount Herbert, you will plainly see what seems a continuation of the remarkable wall of lava which welled ages ago white-hot from the cauldrons of Ruaimoko. Those grey-white parapets of fire-made rock are the Ashes of the Fires of Tamatea, and this is the wonderful tale of Tamatea and his magic fire, a tale of old which brings in, too, our great arrowhead peak, towering yonder on Rapaki’s western side, yon huge upjut lording it sentry-wise over the Maori kainga . The peak of “Tamatea’s Breast,” is one of the very few landscape saliencies in these parts which still remain in the hands of the people of Takitimu descent. A venerable name this, for it is quite six hundred years old and is a connecting link with the greatest land-explorer in Maori-Polynesian story, a prototype of the adventurous “Kai-ruri,” the white surveyor of pakeha pioneering days.
Tamatea seems to have been possessed of the true “wander-hunger,” for when he arrived on the shores of the North Island in his ocean-going canoe the Takitimu (or Takitumu) from his Eastern Pacific home—Tahiti or one of the neighbouring islands—via Rarotonga—his restless heart impelled him to more adventure. First making the land in the far north, he voyaged on down the East Coast, sailing and paddling from bay to bay, leaving here and there some of his sea-weary crew, who intermarried with the inhabitants, and he did not cease his sailorly enterprise until he had reached the foggy shore of Murihiku, the “Tail of the Land” which the white man calls Southland. Here the Takitimu was hauled ashore and if one is to accept literally the legend of the Maori, there she is to be seen now, metamorphosed in marvellous fashion into mountain form, the lofty blue range of the Takitimu—mis-spelled “Takitimos” on the maps and locally spoken of as “the Takitimos.” It is curious that this isolated range—fairy-haunted in native legend—lifting abruptly on all sides from the tussocky plains that slope to Lake Manapouri, from more than one point bears a resemblance to the form of a colossal canoe upturned. Legend, too, says that Tamatea settled awhile at the foot of the Canoe Mountains, and that he had a camp village at the lower end of Lake Te Anau, where eels and birds were abundant.
The Summit Road, overlooking Governor’s Bay.
C. Beken, photo
Then, wearying for the trail and the pikau , he set out on a march which was nothing less than heroic, from Southland to the newly-settled homes of his people in the North. With a number of companions and food bearers the barefooted explorer trudged across country, through the unpeopled tussock prairies of Otago and the plains now known