as Canterbury, fording or swimming the rivers or crossing them on rude rafts (mokihi ) made of bundles of flax-stalks or of dried raupo , until he reached the hills that wall in Lyttelton Harbour. He travelled along the range-top, as was the way of the Maori explorer, until he neared the dip in the sharp ridge at the back of Rapaki, over which the Maoris and the pioneer white men made a track.
Now, Tamatea had carried with him, in a section of a hollow rata log, as was the fashion of the Maori, a smouldering fire for his nightly camps. No common fire this; it was an ahi-tipua , a “magic blaze,” a sacred fire directly kindled from that trebly-tapu fire which Uenuku, the great high priest of far Hawaiki, had sent with his canoe voyagers. The Takitimu, being a tapu canoe, carried no cooked food, and the only plants the people brought in her were ornamental ones, for scent and beauty and sweet flowers. She was a great double canoe, and could carry two hundred people. Her consort was the canoe Arai-te-uru, which carried “Te Ahi-a-Uenuku—Uenuku’s Fire”—and all kinds of food plants, even, says Tikao, a grain which is said to have resembled the pakeha’s wheat. Coming round Te Matau-a-Maui, Hawke’s Bay, the Arai-te-Uru nearly capsized; she went over on her side, and continued in that attitude until she finally overturned at Matakaea Point, near Oamaru, where she still lies—turned to stone! The sacred fire was saved and it was taken by the chiefs up the Waitaki River and placed there in the ground; and there until about forty-five years ago it was still actually burning, issuing from the earth in a little undying flame, and it was called “Te Ahi a Uenuku.” (A seam of lignite is said to have been found burning in the locality by the early settlers and explorers, and this the Maoris identified with the Hawaikian sorcerer’s magic blaze.)
But it seems that Tamatea’s fire so carefully tended by the gods went out as he travelled slowly up the hills from Otago, and none had been kindled again when he reached the Port Hills. And as he and his companions came out of the bush and passed out on to the summit of the mountain above Rapaki, a great storm of wind and rain, followed by hail and snow, burst upon them from the south and they were like to perish from the cold. It was freezing cold, and Tamatea was without fire or the means of making one, for no fire-making timbers grew in that spot. In his extremity he stood upon the tall crag-top yonder—the one that now is called “The Breast of Tamatea”—and called aloud and karakia’d and made incantations for sacred fire to be sent from the North Island, the land of active volcanoes, to save the lives of himself and his companions. He called to his elder relative, Ngatoro-i-Rangi, and to the guardians of the Ahi-Tipua, the volcanic fires.
And the chief’s fervent prayer was answered in a moment. The fire, sent by the gods in the heart of the North Island, burst forth from Tongariro and speeding down the rift of the Wanganui River valley it touched a spot near Nelson, and again it touched Motu-nau—the small island close to the Canterbury Coast—and then it appeared again in a magic blaze on the side of Witch Hill, and the Maori explorers warmed their frozen limbs and were saved. The fire did not stop here in its wonderful flight, for it went on across the harbour, and the white chute of rock, like a huge sheep-dip trough, shining yonder above the bay of Waiaki is the last of the sacred flames of Tamatea.
And when the chief left the spot next day to continue his journey he said, “Let this place be called The Place where Tamatea’s Fire-Ashes Lie”; and so to-day the rocky wall which the white man has named the Giant’s Causeway is to the Maori “Te Whaka-takanga-o-te-Karehu-a-Tamatea.” And the volcanic fire itself is “Te Ahi-a-Tamatea.”
Such is the story of Tamatea’s Fire as told by Hone Taare Tikao, in reciting the legends learned from the long-dead elders of his tribe. A legend embalming a distinct perception of the geological history of these hills. The Kaumatua truly says that the magical walls of Tamatea’s Fire Ashes are of later origin than the volcanic crags and hills which lie about them, and across which they cut. The Wanganui River, down which the sacred fire came from the crater of Ngauruhoe, was then dry; it was a rift opened for it by the Volcano Gods. Tikao speaks of a time when the lower part of Lyttelton Harbour was not in eruption, but when the upper part was; from the southern side of Quail Island to the head of the bay was a furnace; there was no water in it at that immeasurably distant day. There are lava rocks, he says, like those of the Ahi-a-Tamatea on the shore of Quail Island; and then there are the always wonderful cliff of Pari-mataa and the wall of Otarahaka on the Mount Herbert side of the upper harbour.
Of the lava dykes Professor R. Speight writes in his account of the geology of the Port Hills that they radiate from the harbour as a centre and form, as it were, the ribs of the mountain, holding it firmly together and helping it to resist the enormous strains to which it was exposed before and during eruptions. “Judging from the persistent nature of these dykes,” he adds, “it is clear that the mountain must have been split at times from top to bottom, and the liquid material which welled from the fissures must have looked at night like a red-hot streak across the country.”
Te Poho-o-Tamatea, or Tamatea’s Breast, in the middle distance.
W. A. Taylor, photo