And so, by way of the long Maori story, the one solitary example of volcano-legendry the writer has heard from the South Island, we come to the Rapaki peak’s guardian name, Te Poho-o-Tamatea. The explorer bestowed his name upon the height, tapa-ing it after himself and his sacred breast, much as a present-day traveller justly might claim the right to map-name some peak after himself. Tamatea’s travels led him far after he turned his back on the Port Hills. He marched up on the coast to Kaikoura, and there or further north he built a canoe, or, what is more probable, borrowed or forcibly appropriated one belonging to the tangata whenua who must already have been living in the Marlborough country, and crossed to the North Island. He canoed up the Wanganui River—there is a curious rock, the end of which the natives used to paint red with kokowai ochre, projecting from the eastern bank many miles above Pipi-riki, still known as Tamatea’s Rock—and crossed the central plateau to Lake Taupo, and thence went on to the East Coast. There are innumerable stories illustrating his genius for exploration, and from end to end of New Zealand place nomenclature memorises his travels and justifies the name by which he is known in history, Tamatea-pokai-whenua, or “Tamatea-who-travels-through-the-land.” He was a true type of the pioneer and the path-finder, the Fremont of Aotea-roa and the Wai-pounamu, the man who heard the “one everlasting Whisper”—
Something hidden. Go and find it. Go and look behind the Ranges—
Something lost behind the Ranges. Lost and waiting for you. Go!
Chapter VI.
HILLS OF FAERY.
THE LITTLE PEOPLE OF THE MIST.
Our talk turned one day to the poetic legendary past of the Port Hills above us and the Banks Peninsula peaks yonder, hemming in Lyttelton Harbour in an annular line of dead fire crags. They were the hills of an artist’s dream this golden afternoon, all their asperities of crag and bare bluff softened and gilded by the mellow light of a calm, bright, windless day. There was just the faintest of hazy films drawing over the nearer hills from the waters. The sea below us at Rapaki lay in unbreathing quiet, as soft, as bright and blue as Kipling’s Indian Ocean. The rich purple of distance painted the most remote of the Peninsula peaks, and here and there a wispy tail of mist floated about the head of a gully that cleft the crumpled hills swelling up into the rocky summits of the Pohue and the Ahu-patiki. Just where the land went steeply up from the head of the bay to the shoulders of Te Ahu-Patiki, otherwise Mount Herbert, we could see the curious light grey rock wall of the Tarahaka, above the Pari-mataa, “Obsidian Cliff,” like a great chute down the mountain side, gleaming in the sun, the tipua rock of the fire gods. Nearer, in the middle of the picture, were the black volcanic cliffs, and the green slopes and pine-groves of the Lepers’ Isle, the island which the Maoris of old called Otamahua, mapped by the pakeha as Quail Island; it was one tragic spot in the picture, a place of living death.
The Kaumatua spoke of the hilltop homes of the Patu-paiarehe , the fairies, whose craggy castles defended by the thick dark woods and the fogs and mists, ringed all this harbour round and made the high places of the Peninsula an uncanny land, given up to all manner of enchantments. Not that he reposed implicit faith in the fairy stories himself, he told them as he had heard them from his elders in the days of long ago. “We are half pakeha ourselves now, we Ngai-Tahu,” he said, “and our young people deride these notions about the Patu-paiarehe . Yet—these hills were different in my young days, when the mists came down and the fog enveloped the little streams tumbling down all the valleys from the gloomy places. We went birding into the forest, and we made clearings for cultivations and cut firewood in the bush for sale to the pakeha. Sometimes, when the mists came down and the fog enveloped the hills, on still, calm days our old men and women would say the fairies were out, the sun-shunning Patu-paiarehe , and it were well not to venture up the range. On brooding quiet days our people could hear the thin voices of the little folk—they were small, fair people, as all the elders said—crying out to each other and singing fairy songs and playing little songs on their wooden or bone flutes, their koauau and putorino . This Poho-o-Tamatea, the high peak behind the kainga of Rapaki, was one of their homes, their pas , but there were others, the high places of the fairies, all around these hills, from my peak above there right away along the peak-tops touched by the Summit Road, right round to Cooper’s Knobs and then on to the Peninsula, even to Otoki, the haunted mountain which the pakeha calls Brazenose, on the southern side of Akaroa town.”
Rhodes’s Monument (Home of the Fairies), to the east of Mt. Herbert, taken from Lyttelton.
W. A. Taylor, photo