It was my turn to express surprise now, for there, in the spot he had indicated, was a peculiar tatooed sign—a square in a circle, with a small cross in the centre.
I described it to him, and when I had finished he turned round and faced me.
“The sign of forgetting,” he said.
“The ‘sign of forgetting,’ ” I repeated, and my scepticism suffered a shock.
“I thought,” he mused slowly, as he proceeded to dress himself again, “I thought I could not have spent three whole days in that syncope. If I went to that mountain temple and was branded with this mark, which made my adventure seem like a dream, why should not they have branded Grey in such a way—say by rubbing in a different drug—as to make him forget his own name and the face of his friend?”
“And yet—and yet—” I said with some hesitation, “the whole of Te Makawawa’s tale is so remarkable that I cannot say I feel justified in setting out to look for that child without some more certain proof. It is quite possible the old chief has invented the story of the child so as to get us out of the way. The search may lead me to the other side of the world, whereas the Table Land and the mountain are not three days’ journey from here. I believe most firmly that Miriam Grey is there if she is living, but I’m inclined to think that, if there was a child, it died, or was drowned, and that old Te Makawawa invented the rest of the story to throw us off the track. What do you think? Is not our best plan to go and spy out the mountain first?”
“It may be so,” he replied meditatively. “Personally my interest is neither in the child nor in the woman, but in the existence of that ancient temple of a forgotten race, with its white goddess who rivals the dawn, gazing out into the sky with a prayer on her face, and her arms held up to the daybreak of the golden age. It is a grand symbol and, as I said before, I would risk my life to verify it; for even the face of that marble woman appeals to me as no woman’s face has ever done before. I see it in my mind, not as stone, but as that of a living woman whose eyes are full of a holy light. I will go with you to the mountain wall, and, notwithstanding the old chief’s warning, I will search for the ‘way of the spider.’ ”
“Agreed,” I said, “and I will look for the ‘way of the fish,’ whatever that may be, and take my chance of the fierce Ngaraki.”
With our minds made up we decided that it would be better not to inform Tiki of our purpose until, in our route southwards, we came to a point where we could branch off towards the Table Land. We took this precaution lest he should find an opportunity of hurrying back in the night or sending a chance messenger to Te Makawawa telling him of our purpose, in which case I felt convinced we should be followed by a band of his warriors. Having questioned Tiki, I found that the way by which I was to seek the child lay through Karamea, to the west of the Great Tapu Land. It would be an easy matter then to change our minds on the journey, and direct our course towards the forbidden region which we knew must be the place we wanted.
Of our progress on foot towards Karamea little need be said, except that it was fraught with all the difficulties of the virgin bush. Kahikatea had a fowling-piece, and I had my rifle, so that we had no difficulty in procuring wild duck, with here a pig and there a pukako or a kakariki. We gathered our larder up as we went along, for we found the bush-clad hills and gullies most plentifully stocked.