In ten minutes or a quarter of an hour a sudden change came over the springing column of water. It sank gradually back into the pool. The tumult ceased, and the water fell to its former level. The small stream then flowed quietly through the bed of its channel, and all was still again.
Tiki was the first to break the silence.
“The evil spirits have let the flood loose,” he cried. “Did I not say the place was tapu? O Wanaki, let us go back.”
A profuse perspiration was on the Maori’s forehead, and his knees shook. I felt sorry for him, and proceeded to explain an elaborate theory of intermittent springs, helped here and there by a word from Kahikatea. At length we took the keen edge off his fear, for he admitted that our mana[15] was great, but he would not accept our explanation. Taniwhas were more in his line, and his attitude seemed to be based on this principle: Why invent an elaborate hypothesis like ours when a simple one like his would account for all the facts?
Some little time later, when our astonishment had worn off a little, and Kahikatea had begun to gather ferns on the other side of the pool, Tiki took advantage of the opportunity to urge me even more strongly to turn back and not venture further into the haunted place. But I assured him that we had no intention of taking his advice, and he accepted the inevitable, saying again that our mana was great, and that when we got out of the tapu we would no doubt reward his bravery by giving him a pair of trousers and a new pipe—indeed, in consideration of value received, he seemed almost willing to renounce his religion altogether. By his reassuring remarks I certainly gathered the impression that if he were only clad in a complete suit of European clothes no taniwha could touch him. He was no high-class Maori to talk like that, for, if Te Makawawa had caught him in trousers, he would have ordered them off, and thrashed him within an inch of his life for forsaking the ancient glory of his race.
Nothing remarkable happened during the remainder of that night, unless it was that Kahikatea moaned in his sleep several times, and I caught the impassioned words, “Hinauri! Hinauri!” A strong feeling of friendship had sprung up within my heart for this strange man, with his passionate love of birds and trees, of snow-capped mountains and deep, wide solitudes; of great symbols and lofty ideals. His very stone goddess, set with fantastic meaning in the high solitudes of the everlasting mountains, appealed to me as the strongest part of the bond that already existed between us. I lay wondering who he was, and what his past life had been; and, as I wondered, I fell asleep.
CHAPTER V.
ON THE GREAT TAPU.
On the following day, when, after much up-hill work through thick bush, we gained what seemed the summit of a line of hills, we sent Tiki up a tree to search in the distance for the bold mountain wall which Kahikatea said he could dimly remember. When the Maori reached the top he called down that he could see a long, high rock running between two peaks like a great wall. It was far away in the horizon, but he said we could reach it by sunset. Tiki remained up the tree for more than a quarter of an hour, but what he was doing we did not learn until, continuing our march, we discovered that he seemed to know every tree and gully and fern patch on the way. Soon we realised that he was a most useful Maori—he had been mapping out the way from the top of that tree, and was now giving us an instance of the perfection to which the savage bump of locality can be brought. Without the aid of Tiki’s mental chart, I think we should never have been able to thread that mazy labyrinth of dense fern, supplejacks, and tangled undergrowth; and I am positively certain that if it had not been for my fluency of tongue in the matter of Maori abuse, Tiki would never have set his face so resolutely against the dread beings which he fully expected to encounter at every turn.
At length, late in the afternoon, having reached an elevation of some 3,000 feet above the sea level, we came to a gigantic rift in the mountains, through which, in a deep, rocky gully, issued the river which watered the plains far below. Fed by many little mountain tributaries, it issued from the gorge as a considerable body of water, but as we traced it back into the mountains it became a mere stream, frothing between great moss-grown boulders, on which gleamed here and there a mountain daisy, or a white lily bobbing its head in the swishing tide. Crossing and re-crossing this stream to avoid the precipitous rocks that occasionally barred our way, we toiled onwards and upwards until the vegetation began to grow thin and stunted, and, about sunset, we passed beneath two red birches that stood like the gateposts of a meadow land, with their heads woven together in the sunlight by luxurious clusters and festoons of the native scarlet mistletoe bloom.
Standing beneath these gateposts we looked out over what we knew was the Table Land of Te Makawawa’s legend. It was a strange, silent place—a yellow, rolling plain, some three or four miles across, sloping off into rounded hills on the west, and bounded on the east by the peaks we had seen from the distance. The moss-covered plain was almost bare, save for a few clumps of toi-toi, with plumes that waved all golden in the slanting sunlight, while everywhere in the yellow moss grew strange wild flowers, and long ribands of lichen, swept by the wind, trailed from a few stunted and isolated trees. It was like a piece of summer Siberia set down amid verdant surroundings. But what caught my eye more particularly was a stupendous wall of rock that ran up against the eastern sky at a distance of two miles on our left. It seemed to connect the bases of the two peaks which towered above it, their summits tipped with snow. This wall—on which there was now a dark, uneven shadow creeping up as the sun went down beneath the rounded hills opposite—must have been nearly a thousand feet high, and, near its topmost crags, veins of obsidian, or mica, caught and threw back the rays of the sun like the coloured windows of a vast cathedral front.