The Daughter of the Dawn.
CHAPTER I.
A SPLENDID MADMAN.
As this narrative of adventure may possibly fall into the hands of some who will refuse to accept it as anything but a work of the imagination, I, Dick Warnock, the narrator (known to the Maoris as Wanaki), will begin by a slight description of myself, which will speedily disabuse sceptical minds of any doubts. I am, then, a very matter-of-fact individual, so ordinary in intellect that my enemies would without hesitation acquit me of the charge of inventing this strange history, even if they could prove that I was morally capable of such deception. So easily will it be guessed that I fall short of being a creative romancer, that, when the reader looks in vain in these pages for some exalted eloquence of diction, some graphic description of scenery, or some rhapsody on a flower, he will hesitate to cast the blame upon me, the prosaic, especially as here, at the very beginning, I distinctly state that if there is any kind of eloquence in my story, it is the eloquence of strange happenings—a thing which I have endeavoured to keep my pen from spoiling.
It was because I had been born and bred in Maoriland, because I understood the language and much of the ancient lore of the Maoris, that I was commissioned by a firm of solicitors in London to search for one, Miriam Grey. The person in question had sailed from the Old Country eighteen years before, and had joined her husband, William Grey, at Wakatu, in the northern part of the South or Middle Island of New Zealand, known among the Maoris as Te Wai Pounamou, or the Place of the Greenstone. One letter only had reached her relatives at home, and that, dated three days after her arrival, told how she and her husband were about to journey southward, overland, to Hokitika, where he owned a small farm. But that letter was the last, and all attempts on the part of her relatives to discover what had become of her and her husband were fruitless. That they had left Wakatu for Hokitika was easily proved; that they had never arrived at the latter place was also duly ascertained; but what had happened to them between these two points was a matter that had come to be set down among the inexplicables, where it remained, until it was discovered that Miriam Grey was the direct heiress to a large estate in Bedfordshire. Then it became necessary to find, at least, evidence of her death.
For this task I was selected for reasons already stated, and I began by making inquiries at Wakatu, a quaint little English settlement nestling in the hollows of the hills by the seashore. There, after many inquiries, I found a peculiar piece of evidence which excited me to a belief that Miriam Grey was still living. What that piece of evidence was I will not say at this moment, for, though it really constitutes the beginning of my story, its significance was not fully apparent to me until I chanced upon a certain splendid madman in the bush, and compared my fact with a far more extraordinary, though dreamlike, reminiscence of his own. Therefore I will simply state that in consequence of my discovery I left Wakatu and sailed across the bay to Riwaka, having as my destination a wild place called Marahau, the Valley of the Mighty Wind, where, on a high cliff by the seashore, so I was informed, stood the pa[2] of a certain Te Makawawa. Concerning this aged chief report spoke with awe, for he was more than a mere tohunga, a priest—he was an ariki, an arch-tohunga; and some said that he was more than ariki—he was matakite, a seer.
This Valley of the Mighty Wind was some distance round the coast from Riwaka, and it was possible to reach it by boat, but on the day that I had planned to set out a gale was rising, and neither Pakeha nor Maori would put out. Consequently, being both restless and rash, I made the journey on foot across the hills, following some directions given me by an old settler, who had once been to Marahau.
Late in the afternoon, after a weary tramp over densely-wooded mountains, into a region that grew more wild and gloomy as I advanced, I came to a tremendous flax swamp running up between the hills from the seashore. As it was impossible to get through this I turned inland into the virgin bush to avoid it. This detour must have taken me many miles away from the coast, how far I could not tell, for the sound of the gale in the great trees overhead altogether drowned the roar of the sea. As I knew that Te Makawawa’s pa was at the opening of the lonely valley of Marahau, and that I was already too far inland to reach it before dark, I determined to push on as far as possible, and then camp as comfortably as might be under the circumstances.
Towards sunset, after having rounded the great flax swamp, I reached the summit of a line of high hills where the bush was somewhat sparse and stunted. Here, to take my bearings, I selected a tall, thin pine, and climbed to the head of it. By the sight that met my eyes I was a trifle disconcerted. Many miles away was the sea, white with the gale that now swayed me violently to and fro in the feathery top of the pine, while all around, in unending monotony, were the bush-clad hills, stretching away into the south towards the great snow ranges, and rolling on for ever into the west, where, beneath the ragged gold of a stormy sunset, lay the mysterious region of Karamea. But nowhere in the distance could I see the high palisades of Te Makawawa’s pa.
It is strange what a sense of isolation comes to the traveller among these interminable hills and valleys. I was impressed by the wild gloom and solitude of the place, and descended the tree to find a suitable camping-ground by the side of one of the many streams that made their way down between the ridges. It was not the first time I had been compelled to spend the night alone in the bush, and I by no means disliked the solitary feeling of being the only man in a big wilderness. But it so happened that on this occasion I was not the only man there, as I was soon to discover.
I descended the range of hills in an oblique line towards the sea, knowing that among the lower slopes I should easily find a convenient camping-ground. After nearly half an hour spent in arguing with the aggravating creeper known as the prickly lawyer, struggling through interlaced roots up to my chin, and battling with occasional networks of supplejacks, whose one idea seems to be to string a man up by the neck until his natural life be extinct, I at last came into a somewhat broad and open gully, where a stream made its way through groves of white pines and tree ferns. The character of the bush here was totally different from that of the surrounding hills. Instead of thick underscrub I encountered broad spaces here and there, not unlike those of an English wood. Overhead at intervals towered the giant rimu and kahikatea, the monarchs of the bush, and they roared in the gale as such trees alone can roar; while under foot the kidney fern decked the ground and clumped upon the moss-grown tree trunks in profusion. It was while I was making my way through these ferns that I came, suddenly and to my great astonishment, upon a well-worn path.