The aged chief covered his head with his flaxen robe and bowed himself to the earth. A solemn silence fell upon us, so astonished were we at this, his strange story.
CHAPTER IV.
THE HAUNTED REGION.
If there were not so much to tell before I lay down my pen, I might describe the feast which Te Makawawa and his chiefs prepared for us that evening, or give the substance of the wild, poetical songs that were sung in our honour, and of the speeches that were delivered—all bristling with allusions to ancient tradition. But the matter, though interesting, does not concern this history directly. Suffice it to say, then, that I had, from the first, developed a slightly sceptical attitude towards the old chief’s story. This was accentuated by the fact that, after the feast of which I have spoken, one of the songs sung by a young chief contained a chance allusion to Hinauri, giving in a few words the skeleton of a popular legend which differed almost entirely from Te Makawawa’s tradition of the same person. Even if this discrepancy could be explained by saying that a popular legend is often fabricated around the central name of some more ancient tradition, it still remained to deal with the extraordinary parts of Te Makawawa’s story, which were not easy of belief without some kind of verification. Therefore I had many a grave doubt.
On the following day, when we took our departure, the aged chief sent with us a Maori named Tiki, who had been with the party which had taken the child, fifteen years before, and left her at the hut of the Man-who-had-forgotten. This Maori was to be my servant, to aid me in finding Keritahi Kerei, or, as we should pronounce it, Crystal Grey. He was to obey me in all things, and not to leave me under any conditions until the child—now, of course, if living, a girl seventeen or eighteen years of age—was found and brought to Te Makawawa.
When we three, Kahikatea, Tiki, and myself, were leaving the pa, the old chief gave us a solemn and sad farewell. Sitting at the doorway of his house, he said: “Depart, O Kahikatea, Dreamer of dreams! Take not again the ‘way of the spider’ lest you become even as he who has forgotten his name and the face of his friend. Depart, O seeker of the child whose mother awaits you, and forget not my words. Go, my friends, to whom I have shown the secret of the ages. Go! while I remain here watching the kohutukutu’s yellow leaf that will not fall, watching the western sun that cannot set.”
So we left the pa of Te Makawawa, our hearts full of the strange tale we had heard. When we reached the bank of the river we sat down on a log and looked at one another.
“Do you believe the old chief’s tale?” I asked Kahikatea.
“It accounted for my dream,” he replied; “but, do you know, I have never been able to decide whether I dreamed that about the stone woman in the cave, or whether it was an actual experience I went through. All I can be certain of is, that on the floor of my hut, two years ago, I awoke from what I took to be a kind of syncope due to failure of the heart’s action. I went out and shook myself together, and recalled a hazy memory of those things I related to the old chief. Of course, I dismissed the matter as a dream, though that pure white woman’s face I could not, cannot, and do not wish to, dismiss, for I admit to you candidly that I would risk my life to see it again: it has a fine meaning. I say I explained it as a dream, but what perplexed me some time later was, that in my record of the month from full moon to full moon I discovered a gap of three days. Then another thing which puzzled me was that I had a great many bruises that I could not account for, one in particular: a painful sore on my back—by Jove!”
He started up in an excited manner and threw off his coat. Then in another moment his shirt followed, and he stood stripped to the waist.
“Look!” he cried, turning his back to me; “just between the shoulder blades—is there any kind of mark?”