The daughter of the dawn

by William Reginald Hodder

For a long half hour I crouched in the shadows there, thinking that the fierce tohunga would again appear on the scene, but all was quiet: nothing moving except the overflow into the abyss, and the moonlight slowly creeping down after it.

At the end of this half hour a happy idea occurred to me. Perhaps the moonlight would serve me to explore the abyss by the descending pathway I had noticed on the other wall of the gulf. I retraced my steps and stood again by the giants’ window. The moon was in a cloudless sky, and one of the slanting beams fell upon a part of the path some ten yards down. Beyond that the way continued in darkness, but from a brief calculation I concluded that in less than an hour the moonlight would illumine the very depths of the abyss; and if I started at once on my hands and knees I might be able to keep up with it.

It was hard work going down that rough road on all fours, but it was the easiest way in the long run, for a single false step in the darkness would have been fatal. There were no loose stones, but for the first fifty yards the way was very uneven; and, though not steep enough to reach the point where I had seen the patch of sunlight in the morning, sufficiently downhill to make my progress slow and laborious.

From time to time I glanced at the moonlight, which streamed past me on the left, and fell on the perpendicular wall some hundred feet below the basin. I saw more clearly now that as the night wore on and the moon rose higher, its light would flood down into the profound depths of the pit. Already it revealed the outstanding arm of some crag projecting from the other side of the gulf.

When I had proceeded nearly a hundred yards along the descending way, I found that by the help of a granite crag which stood out from the wall, the path turned back upon itself. In this new direction it was less uneven, and, after traversing its length for some fifty yards, I discovered that it turned back upon itself again, leading down in the original direction. It was strange work, crawling along an unknown way in total darkness, and it was in vain that I endeavoured to make light of it.

But the moonlight reassured me somewhat. It was now far below, resting on the perpendicular granite, the bed rock of the world. But still it crept down and down: where was the bottom of this fearful place? Higher and higher rose the moon into the sky; lower and lower her rays sank into the pit. The light was now striking down at an angle of forty-five degrees to the horizontal, and as I scanned its whole length it seemed to me like a solid silver bar strong enough to bear one’s weight from the giants’ window away into the depths below.

The path was now smooth and even, and I gained on the moonlight. When within sixty or seventy yards of its resting-place I was surprised to find a blank precipice in front of me. At least, as I groped before me with my hands, I felt that the rock took a sudden descent. Thinking that this might be anything from a small precipice of three feet to a yawning gulf of a thousand yards, I took a small stone and dropped it over the edge. It fell on solid rock three or four feet below. Scrambling down I found a level step, and, two paces further on, another break leading down again to another step. It was not until I had passed down over several of these that I came to the conclusion that it was a regular staircase on a vast scale. Each step as I stood on that below it reached nearly to my shoulder, and its breadth was quite five feet. Surely I was getting down into the region of the Vile Tohungas, but I was not yet on a level with the moonlight. Another ten or twelve steps brought me to a spot where, thirty yards in front of me, I saw the lower margin of the moonbeams strike upon the grey granite wall, which as yet gave no hint of where it might find a basement in the yawning gulf below. I sat down to wait, knowing that between forty and fifty yards lower down the staircase must meet the wall and turn back again upon itself in order to continue the descent.

Now that I had nothing to do but to await developments, I felt the silence and the darkness resting like crushing weights upon my senses. Not far away on the left I could hear the faint swish of the torrent from the lake as it fell through the darkness, but no sound came up from below to tell that it had found a bottom in that profundity beneath. With my physical eyes I could see little, but the scene as I viewed it in my mind’s eye was one of stupendous grandeur. Behind, far above, was the moonlight flooding through the giants’ window, and striking down through the dark until it fell upon the granite, glistening with a pale grey before me. High overhead I knew the long spar hung suspended, and below, shrouded in impenetrable gloom, was a world of unknown things hidden in the blackness of darkness for ever.

Into this gloom I peered and waited. The edge of the light cut the dark as sharp as a knife, leaving a surface like jet. By whatever agency—human, natural, or diabolic—this pit had been hewn out of the solid rock in the remote past, it seemed that on clear nights the moon must still hew it out again from the solid dark. Here then was the Pit: where were the Vile Tohungas?

I was aroused from my dreams of the “giants in those days”—the Vile Tohungas who, according to Te Makawawa, inhabited this lower part of the temple—by the moonlight impinging upon something standing up out of the darkness towards my left. I fixed my eyes upon the object, thinking it was the