At length I rose and sought out Miriam Grey in the inner cave. The three were still sitting talking together in low tones, and I hesitated before disturbing them. But I felt that the matter was urgent.
“I’m afraid there will be a battle among the Maoris before long,” I said, standing before them. “They have arranged themselves into two hostile camps, and look as if they mean fighting.”
Miriam Grey rose to her feet.
“I knew it,” she said; “I knew there would be trouble, but Ngaraki would bring the tribes together. He has told them too much, and now they have the idea that they are to win their land back and drive the English into the sea. But Te Makawawa knows better. Is he there?”
“Yes,” I said. “He controls one camp, and another warlike chief who occupies the stronghold commands the other.”
“There may still be time when Ngaraki returns at sunset,” she said. “He will know nothing of it, for he will come by the secret entrance at the back of the mountain—the ‘way of the lizard’; but he will quiet them if Te Makawawa cannot. When he comes and sees what he shall see he will be like a thousand men, and at ordinary times he is terrible enough, for I have watched his face while he has chanted his karakias in this cave.”
Under Miriam’s direction Grey and I removed the statue from its place and concealed it among the wooden gods in the darkness of the inner cave. It appeared that this removal was only rendered possible by the fact that, some years before, Ngaraki, impatient at Hinauri’s delay, had, with great toil and by means of an old sword—apparently the gift of an early explorer to some ancestor of the Rangitane—found among the weapons in the inner cave, achieved the difficult task of sawing through the base of the statue, where it was in one piece with the marble floor. This was to loosen one more of the fetters of Hinauri, for, as he said, “How could she move to life when her feet were fast bound to the rock?” Thus the place where Hinauri had stood through the ages was now left vacant, so that her living image might stand there with her arms outstretched to the western sky, with the same loveliness of old upon her face, and the same age-long prayer upon her parted lips. This, Miriam maintained, was not a trick, but a test, for none knew as well as Ngaraki the form and features of his ancient goddess! None could say with him, “This is she for whom I waited, for whom I prayed and toiled my whole life long.”
CHAPTER XXIII.
THE DAUGHTER OF THE DAWN.
Towards sunset I stood at the opening of the cave and looked down upon the rolling plain below, with the Lion Rock enclosing the little valley against the mountain wall. About the banks of the stream the afternoon sun, obscured from me by some crags that stood out upon my left, slumbered upon beds of moss, and all was hushed. Thistle-down floated along the slow currents of the air; gnats and bright-coloured beetles winged their way above the tops of the dreamy trees, while here and there a tui flashed out from the foliage to chase them in the sunlight. And in the bosom of the quiet was felt at intervals the single bell-like note of the korimako—a drop of liquid sound falling into the deep well of silence—the ping of some little heart of air bursting in a single throb of pure delight. These sights and sounds below were to me the points of a great hush which reigned beneath the cloudless sky, as if Nature, like a fair quietist, had fallen into a trance, yet having her blue eyes wide open.
As I leaned against the side of the cave’s mouth and gazed down upon the dreamy scene, the melancholy of it all laid hold upon me—that melancholy, I mean, which is at once the matrix of joy and sadness, and which, like beauty, is far within the eyes that see it, deep within the heart that feels it. In its atmosphere our souls may almost bridge vast gulfs of time and enclose far-sundered points in space.