Kahikatea said these words in deep abstraction. I took small note of them at the time, though afterwards, when everything was made clear to me, when my own mind had yielded to nothing less than ocular demonstration, they were burnt deep into my brain as some of the truest and sanest words ever uttered. So deep was my friend’s abstraction that he was unconscious of having thought and spoken. This was evident, for, starting as if recalled from a deep reverie, he proceeded to reply to my last remark.
“No,” he said; “it is absurd to believe that a stone can turn into flesh and blood; yet I believe that Hinauri, the Daughter of the Dawn, will return. That is my madness, Warnock, and yet it seems so sane that even now I regard her as a living woman—the only one in the world for me.”
He rose as he spoke, and knocked his pipe out against the mountain wall. Turning towards me with a smile, he added: “If your determination to find Crystal Grey is half as great as mine to reach the cave where the pure white woman stands, you will find her, and then—well, I have prophesied what I have prophesied: the woman who harboured the vision of Hinauri could not have borne an unlovely child.”
Early on the following morning we left the shadow of the mountain wall and passed out from the Table Land beneath the red birches crowned with mistletoe. By Tiki’s guidance we retraced our steps, and by nightfall again reached the pool beneath the high cliff where we had witnessed the phenomenon which had so terrified the Maori.
Here we prepared to camp, but when I went to draw water from the pool to boil the billy, I discovered something which not only threw an additional light on the inner workings of that temple in the rock which we had left behind us, but also had the effect of preventing our camping at that spot. As I was stooping to draw up the water, something floating on the surface near by attracted my attention. Taking a dry branch from the bank I fished the object towards me and held it up.
It was a hat!
I looked at it more closely in the uncertain light and recognised the article. It was my own hat that had gone down into the abyss in that terrible fight with Ngaraki and his speechless men in the interior of the mountain. With my body full of shudders at the thought of what else had fallen into the abyss on the same occasion, and my head full of the only possible explanation of this remarkable find, I sought Kahikatea, and we agreed to move on and camp on the bank of some tributary stream lower down; which we did.
CHAPTER XI.
THE SEARCH FOR ‘THE LITTLE MAIDEN.’
On the following morning I parted with Kahikatea, who was going back to his hut among the mountains, and thence to the nearest civilised part to procure such things as he required for his exploration. Tiki and I continued our way south towards the cottage on the bank of the stream where his band had left the child in Grey’s care fifteen years before; not that we expected to find Crystal Grey still there, but for all that it was the right point at which to begin our search. I may say here that I no longer had any doubts as to whether the child left there by the Maoris was Miriam Grey’s daughter, and, as we journeyed along towards the gap between two lines of snow mountains, I talked with Tiki about her.
“What clothes had she on when you took her south?” I asked.