stay for visitors, just below a remnant of the ancient bush on the northern and sunny slope of the green mountain. There was a good spring of water close by, and this important fact no doubt determined the situation of the Ngati-Mamoe hillmen’s village. In Ngai-Tahu times, after Te Rangi-Whakaputa had conquered this pa in the course of his subjugation of the Whaka-Raupo aborigines, the vicinity was found by the Ngai-Tahu to be a very suitable spot for such vegetable foods as the korau and the pora , or pohata, now extinct; the roots, which were sweet, were dried in the sun and stored in ruas , or underground pits and earthed-in storehouses, as potatoes and kumara are now. Kumara and taro , the tropic foods of the north, did not flourish in the hill country of the south, though they did well enough, with care, on favoured parts of the Canterbury Plains and the Coast.
There is in Maori belief an exceedingly tapu spot on Tauhinu-korokio, close to where the old Ngati-Mamoe pa stood. It was probably either a tuahu or a burying-place; the tuahu was the spot where the tribal gods, or, rather, their symbols in wood and stone, were kept, and where the wise men, the tohungas, resorted for incantation and occult ceremonies and the black art of the makutu, by which enemies might be slain though they were at a great distance, by thought transmission and the malignant projection of the will. It is not well to camp there even now, should you have Maori blood in your veins. The flax-clumps and the tauhinu bushes still murmur the name of Ngati-Mamoe, and though pakeha sheep have long grazed over the site of Tauhinu-korokio and pakeha voices make lively the mountain side, the soil holds the mysterious spell of the tapu. Maoris who have camped on the side of the track which goes over the hills there have spent a night of inexplicable discomfort, inexplicable, that is, but for the presence of the tapu and the unseen spirits of Maoridom. Taare Tikao himself says that many years ago, when he was shearing at Major Hornbrook’s, he was taken suddenly and mysteriously ill, and that the illness was probably the effect of the local tapu. However, these fancies need not trouble the pakeha, whose constitution is not affected by even the most virulent of Maori bedevilments.
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