The Kaumatua swept his finger across the southern sky-line, the wild and broken peaks of Banks Peninsula, rising up in powerful slants from the soft blue of the harbour, creased with the gullies of water-courses. “Over yonder,” he said, “are the chief pas of the Patu-paiarehe , which I shall list for you: There is the rock of Te Pohue, which pakehas call the Monument between Purau and Port Levy; there is Hukuika Peak, on the hill road between Pigeon Bay and Little River; there is the mountain-top of Te U-Kura, which commands all the hill-country of the Peninsula—it is just at the back of the stopping-place called Hilltop on the road from Little River to Akaroa town. Also there are the high rocky peaks which overlook Akaroa Harbour—Pu-Waitaha, or French Hill, between Wainui settlement and Buchanan’s; Otehore, a rocky flat-topped height above French Farm, on the upper part of the harbour; the summit heights above Akaroa town, Purple Peak, Mount Berard and Brazenose—these we call O-te-Patatu, Tara-te-rehu, and Otoki; and lastly Tuhiraki, the sky-pencilling peak, which the French named Mount Bossu, on the western side of the harbour. All these were the mountain pas of the fairies.
“Now, amongst the fairy pas ,” the word-of-mouth historian went on, “there are two places of particular enchantment. One is that lofty palisade of a peak which you call Brazenose, and the level-topped hill above French Farm. Otoki—the Place of the Axe—is the name for Brazenose, but there is an ancient burying-ground there, upon the misty mountain immediately above the little Maori village of Onuku, on the beach side, which is called Otehore; the Wahi-tapu , or cemetery, makes it doubly sacred. This place and the height above French Farm were both called Otehore, and the people of the mists loved them well. On the small piece of level ground on that Otehore which stands above French Farm the fairy hapu of those parts had their pa , and there they would gather at night for their fairy meetings, and gather by day also in the foggy weather when no Maori eye could see them; and then would be heard their sweet fairy songs, their waiatas , and the tunes they played upon their flutes, sounding faintly from the cloudy mountain.”
Indeed, on dim and foggy days, and when the wet vapours becloud the long-dead volcano land, it is not difficult to enter into the spirit of the Maori fancy, and in imagination people all these craggy pinnacles with the Patu-paiarehe , and the wooded gulches with Maeroero , the wild men of the bush. When the mists steal down on the rhyolite knobs of the fire-fused Port Hills and the Peninsula, craggy beyond description, peaked in a hundred fantastic shapes, with great black and grey nipples of lava protruding from the grassy slopes and the woody ridges, the land has an eerie look, fit playground for the Forgetful People, as the old Irish would have called them. In the early morning too, when the fogs are lifting from the bays, and here and there a black broken thumb of a peak juts out above the trailing vapours, or the mist-wreaths drape in torn veilings the huge rampart-like scarps, and when the first rosy sunbeams glorify the half-revealed mountains, the poetic mind can well conceive of this region as one of fairy wizardry and all manner of dusk-time magic. One day when it rained and blew, we were motoring over the hills from the Plains to Akaroa, scarcely able to see twenty yards in front of the car when we ran cautiously round to Hilltop. Suddenly the dense masses of fog were rent aside by the wind, and right above us, with a fore-ground of blackened tree-stumps, remnant of the ruined forest, we caught a glimpse of the black, jagged tor which the Maori called Te Puha, thrust up like a great spearhead by Ruaimoko, the Fire-God; in the light of the Kaumatua’s stories it was easy to imagine it a sentry-tower of the fairies, or of such a place of witchery as the Ben Bulben of which we read in W. B. Yeats’s “Celtic Twilight.”
There is another rugged, dark volcanic crag, wooded about its base, crowning one of these Peninsula ridges, of which the Old Man of Rapaki has a poetic story. This is the pinnacle above and to the north of the Hilltop Hotel, on the divide where the traveller gets his first sight of Akaroa lying more than a thousand feet below. The Kaumatua gave it as one of his fairy peaks, its Native name is Te U-Kura, and as far as I have been able to ascertain, it bears no official pakeha name. Te U-Kura, he says, is an exceedingly ancient designation; it was a name given by the fairies. It means “The Resting Place of the Ruddy Light.” In his younger days, when he lived at Tikao Bay, on the shores of Akaroa harbour, he frequently observed for himself the peculiar fitness of the Hilltop name. Often at sunset a cloud-cap would rest lightly on the dark skull of the fairy crag, and to this cloud the declining sun would impart a bright red glow, the kura of the Maori. This was a sign to the weather-wise that a nor’-wester was blowing on the Canterbury Plains—a tohu , or token, that was seldom astray. “U” means to rest, as a canoe upon the beach. This surely is a name that the pakeha should imprint upon his Peninsula maps. It lends itself to more than one euphonious variant in the pakeha -tongue, as “Red Cloud’s Rest,” or “Place of the Sunset’s Glow.”
Behind the town of Akaroa, the grassy hills, lightly wooded here and there like a beautiful wild park, culminate in a craggy skyline, more than a thousand feet above the fields and orchards on the town outskirts. Dark tors of rhyolite, grassed to the base of
Cockayne’s Cairn Cass Peak
Kennedy’s Bush.
W. A. Taylor, photo
their nippled upswells, dreamy on sunny days in their delicate wash of hazy blue. Here near the Stony Bay road saddle, is the legend-haunted O-te-Patatu, the old-time ridge of the fairies and the