The fire was burning low, and I knew that the old woman would have to go for more wood unless she hurried with the preparation of her meal, and that as long as I was there I was delaying her. So I rose to go. The old man excused himself for not rising by pointing to his lame legs. She saw me to the gate, and as I struck down the road she waved her hand after me in farewell, and remained behind the screen of trees round which I veered.
Down in the valley lying almost precipitately below me were a number of natives working in their fields; but my road led me on to the cities, and it is there that the future of this race hangs in the balance.
Some months later, while I was living in Dunedin in the far south of the South Island, the newspapers came out in a way almost American, so exciting was the bit of news. The editorial world forgot all decorum and dignity and pulled out the largest type it had on hand. It was announced that the Maori priest, Rua, was caught. Several persons were wounded and one, I believe, was killed in the process. The priest was treated with no respect and little consideration and thrown into prison,—all because he believed in having several wives as his men-folk always had, if they were chiefs and priests, and was trying to put a little life into his race, trying to stir it up to casting out these "foreign devils." He had built himself a temple that was an interesting work of art, but it holds worshipers no more, even though the priest has since been released. His efforts to rouse his people failed. Such efforts are only the reflex action of a dying race.
CHAPTER VII
ASTRIDE THE EQUATOR
The Second Side of The Triangle
Dark is the way of the Eternal as mirrored in this world of Time: God's way is in the sea, and His path in the great deep.—Carlyle.
1
More than a year went by before I began drawing in the radial thread that held me suspended from the North Star under the Southern Cross,—a year replete with lone wanderings and searching reflections. During all those months not a single day had passed without my surveying in my mind's eye the reaches of the Pacific that lay between me and the Orient. Roundabout New Zealand I had become familiar with the Tasman Sea looking toward Australia, on the shores of which I had spent some of the most mysterious nights of my life; on Hawkes Bay looking out toward South America; and across the surging waters of Otago Harbor at Dunedin, looking in the direction of the frozen reaches of Antarctica.
