The daughter of the dawn

by William Reginald Hodder

The moon, looking a trifle faded, was just above the western hills when I started up out of my sleep as if I had heard a sudden noise, but all was still as the grave. For several seconds I wondered what had awakened me; then I recollected my whereabouts, and, missing the sound of the stream, knew that its sudden stoppage had served the purpose of an alarum clock.

My first thought was to make sure that it had only just stopped, and I soon settled this, for when I hurried to inspect the channel I found that the water was still trickling slightly from one pool to another before ceasing entirely.

Now was my chance. I obliterated all the signs of my camp as far as was possible, and, stowing my rifle and ammunition in a safe place, hurried along the bank towards the deep pool. Scarcely had I reached the last group of bushes, however, when I had cause to start back and hide myself. There was someone climbing out of the empty pool. Peering through the branches I saw Ngaraki raise himself to the bank. He had a large Maori kit in his hand, and with this he walked along the bank towards me. The light was dim, and I crouched among the bushes while he passed by within several feet of where I stood. He was evidently going to fill the kit with kumaras and fruit, and take it within the mountain again. Why was this lordly chief, whose back was tapu, playing the part of a slave, if not for the same reasons that had actuated Te Makawawa before him—to serve the woman with the stars in her eyes?

I saw my best chance was to enter at once. Accordingly, as soon as Ngaraki was out of immediate earshot, I slipped from my concealment, and, climbing cautiously down the bank, dropped on to the shingly bed of the stream. Before me in the wall of the rock, its lower lip level with the bottom of the channel, was the now vacant aperture, between six and seven feet in diameter, and beyond this was the inky blackness of the cavern within.

I entered the gloomy place, and felt slight gusts of wind upon my face. Advancing a pace or two on the hard, smooth, rocky floor within, I looked about me. At first I could see nothing, but presently my eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, and I found that the cavern—for such it was—was not as dark as I had thought; I could discern great spaces, with vast shadows beyond them. Immediately before me, some ten paces away, was visible the dim outline of a colossal rock, smooth and rounded. From this a tremendous spar sloped upwards towards the further wall of the cavern. But these things were towering above me, and I could get but the vaguest idea of their outline.

I now felt at a loss to know which way to proceed; and, fearing that at any moment Ngaraki might return, or that a torrent of water might spring up out of the darkness and wash me out of the mountain like a bruised rat out of a hole, I made up my mind to risk lighting a match to see if I could find the source of the stream. I advanced further into the cavern, testing every footstep, then, striking a match, I held it up and took a hurried glance round. The floor, worn smooth by the action of water, sloped up to a huge basin-shaped rock about five yards in advance of where I stood, and from the lower part of this rock I caught sight of water trickling as if from a crevice. Quickly I ran towards this and examined it. In the lower part of the side of the great vessel was an aperture five or six feet in diameter, which appeared to be stopped up by a rock fitting the inner edge so neatly that there was hardly a crevice except that through which trickled the small escape which had attracted my notice. I could hear the sound of waves lapping against the rocks above me, and concluded that there was a large body of water in some reservoir there.

I immediately set to work to find a way up the sheer wall which, with the great basin, enclosed the space where I stood, making a kind of rugged courtyard some ten or twelve yards square. The wall which ran round this space joined with the wall of the cavern on each side of the aperture by which I had entered, and also with the basin on each side of the orifice which was stopped by the stone, leaving just enough of its curved contour to suggest the idea that it was a basin. It was quite twenty feet high, and at the top there appeared to run a platform. It was this that I set myself to reach.

A hasty search of the water-worn wall all round, by the light of a match, revealed, on the left hand as I faced the entrance, a series of holes in the rock, evidently designed as a ladder. Up these I made my way and scrambled on to the platform above. Here a strange and wonderful scene lay spread out before me in a dim, misty light—a scene whose details appeared indeed to be the handiwork of some giant race. The vast cavern itself was apparently the work of some disruptive agency, but it was simpler to believe that the objects which it contained had been fashioned with human purpose and design, than that they were the slow work of natural forces during the lapse of ages. Before me, and occupying the whole of the cavern to my right, stretched a large lake, with its waters seething as if in a boiling cauldron. Flung up in a tumult from below, with huge bubbles bursting on the surface, it rolled outwards to the almost circular margin, and lapped against the platform on which I was standing. Beyond the foam and turmoil of this lake was dimly visible the further bank, and above that rose the craggy sides of the cavern, arching up far overhead into the darkness. At a glance I saw how the place was lighted. Towards the left, at the end of a gradually narrowing prolongation of the cavern, running off obliquely from some outstanding crags straight across the lake, I could see an opening, with huge perpendicular bars like the irons of a grating. Through this colossal window, which opened on the other side of the mountain wall, the rosy dawn was sending its first messengers into the gloomy place, shedding a soft, diffused glow, in which everything found a spectral outline.

The topography of this vast cavern was so remarkable and awe-inspiring that I must describe it here in detail, though briefly. The huge rock which I had seen from below I now made out to be a bowl-shaped receptacle some thirty feet in diameter, filled with water from the lake by means of a narrow channel, so that the flat surface which led round the top of the basin was continuous with the rim of the lake. It seemed possible, by means of this continuous and level pathway, to walk round the top of the basin and strike right across to the other side of the cavern, upon a narrow partition that separated the lake on the right from a profound abyss on the left—an abyss which I saw occupied the whole of the remaining part of the place, including the gulf with the giants’ window at its far end. It would have been possible to get across the cavern in this way, had it not been for a gap in the partition, through which the overflow of the lake rolled into the depths below. Upon the further lip of the basin which faced the abyss rested a gigantic spar of granite, the long tapering point of which sloped upwards for some fifty yards towards the further roof of the cavern, while its more compact and weighty end lay beneath the water in the huge vessel. It was evidently the head of this long spar which now blocked the hole in the bottom and prevented the water from escaping.

As I was gazing in wonder at these extraordinary stones, I was aroused by the sound of a footstep crunching on the shingle at the entrance below. It was Ngaraki coming back. My first impulse was to plunge into the water and hold on to the rim of the lake, and so conceal myself; but, thinking there might be some recess near at hand I glanced along the wall of the cavern to my right, and, seeing a spot nearly half-way round where the rock seemed to be a shade darker than the general gloom, I made towards it along the narrow margin of the lake. When I reached it I found that it was a little recess stocked with what appeared, by the feel of them, to be pieces of the resinous rimu-heart which the Maoris use for torches. I could not stay there, as no doubt Ngaraki would want a torch, and would come to the recess to get one. Getting a trifle flurried, I continued my way round to the other side of the lake. There was less light here, owing to the buttress of crags round which the light from the grating came but faintly, and consequently I ran less risk of being seen; but if I was to learn anything of the secrets of the place and of Miriam Grey, as well as avoid an unnecessary conflict with Ngaraki, I must hide, and that quickly, for now I saw the dim form of the tohunga moving on the other side. He was carrying something, probably the kit full of provisions, along the margin of the lake towards the recess where I knew the torches were stored.