“Good God!” said Grey suddenly, “it’s too late; it’s all a blank—I remember nothing—nothing!”
And then I knew that the aged chief Te Makawawa was dead.
“No, it can’t be,” she cried, in answer to his words. “I should have seen it in your face before. I am certain it can’t be; I should have felt it. Dear husband! take me in your arms again and call me wife. No one has ever come between us.”
“And no one ever shall,” he replied.
In the silence that followed I withdrew, and when the manifold sound of agony and wailing, coming out of the far darkness of the interior, again fell upon my ears, I felt toned up to endure it. But another voice, rising up out of the abyss, high and jubilant, told me that Ngaraki was there holding his grim triumph. I picked up my torch and made my way down.
When at last my feet found the great granite steps at the bottom of the vast place, I saw lights flickering below. The chief was preparing many torches and placing them all about, chanting in measured tones the while. I put out my own light and crept down almost to the lowest step, where I stood and witnessed a scene of a savage drama so wild and strange that I must lay down my pen awhile before attempting to describe it.
CHAPTER XXVI.
NGARAKI’S HOUR OF TRIUMPH.
On the floor of the abyss was a mighty wreck. The falling spar had snapped the heads from the shoulders of the vile brood, and here and there a granite torso, topping the ruins, indicated the semicircle where they had once stood looking up at the moon, each nursing his stomach and curling his lips in that everlasting smile of calm disdain. One image alone was spared—and he stood apart facing the white gleam of the cataract and looking up through the dark with his back turned upon the colossal débris: the Twelfth Tohunga remained untouched, and, at his feet, not far from the abyss below the abyss, was the great round stone, still unbroken.
About the more open spaces of the floor between the shattered ruins and the sheer wall of the abyss moved Ngaraki—a tall figure clad only in his undergarment of tasselated flax, girded fast about his waist with a warrior’s belt. As he paced to and fro he chanted. Then, whirling his meré round his head, he danced and yelled like a very savage. His voice rose high with jubilant rage; it was his hour of triumph, and the fury of it was appalling. The blazing torch in one hand, the green flashing meré in the other, and his wild, illustrative gestures from the war-dance invested him with all the terrors of savagery. But always there was the dignity and masterly movement of the chief. To me, who loved this great Tohunga, it was a grand spectacle; to me, who feared him, it was awe-inspiring, terrible. And through it all, yet heard only in the pauses of the chant, there came the wailing shrieks and gnashing cries of the wizard standing far up there in the darkness on the basin’s rim.
In the midst of his wild vehemence the chief espied one of the heads lying face uppermost on the floor. Its glaring red eyes and the sneer upon its lips infuriated him on a sudden. In one spring he was upon it, and, with two mighty blows, each accompanied by a terrific yell, he brought red sparks from that Vile Tohunga’s eyes, and then broke forth in a wilder strain than ever. To my wrought mind the whole thing suggested a symphonic music scored by some Grand Devil of a Master, whose gamut ran from hell to heaven, whose instruments went raving mad in the rendering, whose world was earthquake and eclipse, with the lightning flashing through the dark, and the thunder of the storm gods roaring round him. Built on a bass of gloom, the triumphant strain of Ngaraki, the ghoul-motive of the shrieking wizard, the sad murmur of the rising wind in the giants’ window, and, above all, the unheard part called up here and there in the chief’s chanting: his love-strain of Hinauri—these were running through my prosaic soul in a way which hinted that perhaps the fate in store for me was to go forth from that awful place madder than that “some Grand Devil of a Master” himself.