“She will never come again. No distant dawn will bear her feet, no sun ray bring her back to life.
“Alas! Alas! the wild white crane against the cloud a moment shows her shining wing, then all is dark and all is lost.”
He paused for a moment on the brink of the abyss—a torchlight picture framed in the gloom of his ancient temple. For a moment his eyes were raised as if his glance could pierce through the darkness and beyond the cavern’s roof; then his voice rang out again in fiercer tones:
“She stays not! neither will I stay! I’ll fling me to the dark! Ngha!
“Down, down into the black abyss, that I may gain the sparkling stars and look into her eyes once more.”
As a soul plunges down into the world of spirits from the heights of gloomy Reinga, so he hurled himself headlong into the abyss, lighting the way to death with his blazing torch. The sight of it wrung a cry from me. I slid down the rope and made my way to the brink of the abyss, where I leaned forward, gazing into the darkness. Far down a light burns still and clear—a night-lamp by a hero’s bedside. For a moment I think I see its ray light up the image of Zun the Terrible, for ever gazing upwards through the night. The love that does not die is stamped upon the granite face. “I will return,” is graved indelibly upon his breast, and the hands that graved it are clasped above his heart. The leaping flame springs up, and all is dark again. Kia kotahi ki te Ao: kia kotahi ki te Po: Ngaraki is dead, but clings to Life in the darkness.
While I remained standing on the brink of the abyss, full of a savage pathos for the noble Maori chief, as well as with sorrow for his goddess, my ear caught something unusual. A dull roar came up from the depths, faint and far away; could it be that the overflow from the lake had found a bottom at last? I listened intently, and even as I did so the sound seemed to deepen. Was this the work of the rolling stone which Ngaraki had launched from the mysterious lever in the Place-of-Many-Chambers, or had the great round rock which he had rolled down after the Vile Tohunga’s head blocked the channel and dammed the water back?
Whatever was the cause, I soon came to the conclusion that the water was rising rapidly in the abyss below the abyss. It would fill the gulf, and then would flow out through the giants’ window into the fissure beyond. But while concluding the matter thus there came back into my mind the words of Te Makawawa in reference to the ancient tradition of the mysterious lever: “When it is raised all the ways of the temple will be closed.”
I was about to follow this matter up and see for myself, when there was a sound like a great gush of water in the lake as if another sluice gate had been unbarred in its depths. Then I heard the increase of the flood as it hissed and tore through the aperture in the partition and fell into the darkness of the abyss. Presently the change was marked again by a louder thunder from the depths. In the midst of this I heard a shout from the direction of the gulf. I hastened towards it, and, midway on the path that led to the giants’ window, encountered Grey and his wife. Grey, the man who had forgotten, looked into my eyes without the slightest sign of recognition and said:
“Look there! What is to be done? That is the way out—I travelled it quite lately—and it’s closing up—my wife tells me there are two more here besides yourself. Where are they?”