Maori folk-tales of the Port Hills, Canterbury, New Zealand (2024)

PREFACE

In this little book I have endeavoured to interweavewith descriptions of the most picturesque parts of theCanterbury Port Hills some of the Maori poetic legendsand historical traditions which belong to theRange, and which have not previously beenrecorded. These stories, I hope, will invest with anew interest for many Canterbury pakehas the scenicbeauties of the Port Hills now opened up from endto end by the Summit Road. Here I desire to recordalso, with feelings of gratitude, the name of theprincipal narrator of the legends, Mr. Hone TaareTikao, of Rapaki, a Ngai-Tahu gentleman whoseuncommonly retentive memory is a storehouse ofinformation on local history and who blends inhimself the gifts of the folk-lorist and the genealogist.Some of the place-names were supplied bythe late Mr. T. E. Green (Tame Kirini), of Tuahiwi,Kaiapoi, one of the last good native authorities onthe ancient history of the plains.

For the priceless gift of free access to these grandtops of the Port Range the people are indebted tothe efforts and the gifts of a few public spiritedresidents, but most of all to the exertions ofMr. H. G. Ell, whose enthusiasm, prescienceof vision, and singleness of purpose in developingthe Summit Road along this mountain park haveproperly earned him the admiration and the thanksof thousands of his fellow-citizens who daily liftup their eyes to the Hills and who find on thosehills their pleasure and their solace for town-tiredbody and brain. And maybe if Mr. Ell’s name werebestowed, like Tamatea’s of old, upon one ofthese monumental crags still unchristened, it wouldbut fittingly preserve the memory of a man whosetitle to such local honour and fame is certainlygreater than that of some of his forerunners whosenames the landscape bears.

J.C.

CONTENTS.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

[1]

MAORI FOLK-TALES OF THE PORT HILLS

Chapter I.

THE STORY OF THE ROCKS.

With the opening of tracks along the bold range ofheights between the Canterbury Plains and LytteltonHarbour, and the acquisition of new reserves for thepublic, mainly through the efforts of one tirelessworker, Mr. H. G. Ell, Christchurch residentsare perhaps coming to a more lively sense of the valueof the Port Hills as a place of genuine recreation.The Summit Road has made city people free of thegrandest hilltop pleasure place that any New Zealandcity possesses within easy distance of its streets, andthe worth of this mountain track, so easily accessibleand commanding so noble a look-out over sea andplains and Alps, will increase in proportion to thegrowth of the Christchurch population. The fragmentsof the native bush which survive in the valleyswill be of surpassing botanical interest inanother generation or two, but the vegetation of thehills inevitably will suffer many changes, and anexotic growth will for the most part replace theancient trees. With all the alterations which man’shand may make in the reserves and along the publictracks, however, the monumental rock-beauty willremain the great and peculiar feature of the hills,their most wonderful and unalterable glory. The PortRange and the Banks Peninsula system of mountainsare indeed the most remarkable heights in the wholeof the South Island, not excepting the snowy Alps;[2]there is nothing like them outside the northern volcanicregions, and in some aspects they carry a greaterscientific and scenic value than even the crater-conesaround the city of Auckland. What the Canterburycoast would have been like but for the vast volcanicconvulsions which formed these ranges and hugecraters is not difficult to imagine. It would have beena uniform billiard-table on an enormous scale, verygently sloping to the sea, with scarcely a break butfor the snow rivers and with never a usable naturalharbour. Volcanic energy gave us Lyttelton andAkaroa harbours, and shaped for us also the ever-marvelloushills that are at once a grateful relief tothe eye from the eternal evenness of the plains anda healthful place of pleasure for our city dwellers.

The passage of untold ages has so little alteredthese fire-made ranges that build a picture-like ringabout Lyttelton Harbour that their origin and historyare plainly revealed to the climber and the SummitRoad stroller; the story of the rocks can scarcely bemistaken. Geologists from the days of von Haasthave written much of the Lyttelton and Akaroa volcanicsystems, and in truth it is an ever-new andever-fascinating subject. There is hardly a moreinteresting specimen of vulcanism in New Zealand,for example, than the strange wall of grey-white lavarock which Europeans call the Giant’s Causeway andthe Maoris “The Fire of Tamatea,” which protrudesfrom the hilltop just above Rapaki, and which maybe seen again on the far side of the harbour, avolcanic dyke that the ancient people—with surelysome perception of geological truth—connected intheir legends with the internal fires of the NorthIsland. Along the craggy hill faces again, and particularlywell in such places as Redcliffs and theSumner end of the range, it is easy to read the history[3]of the rocks in the alternate strata of solid volcanicrock and the soft rubble that seems almost to glowagain with the olden fires. The most wonderfulexample of this stratified formation is the face of thesouth head of Akaroa Harbour; but it is possible tostudy similar pages in the volcanic chapter ofCanterbury’s history without going many yards fromthe Summit Road anywhere from the sea to the hillsabove the harbour head.

The most perfect local example of an ancient craterperhaps is one that does not seem to have attractedmuch attention from scientific writers and lecturers,and this may be mentioned as a type of the remarkableplaces which build up the romantic ruggedness andsavageness of our harbour-palisading hills. It is tobe studied especially well from the Lyttelton-Governor’sBay road. Above Corsair Bay and CassBay there is a group of bold rocky peaks which, asthe traveller passes onward from Lyttelton, is seento curve inward in a huge half-cup, open to the south,and down this open side are strewn the disorderlyremains of the old lava stream which flowed from thecore of the volcano and which ran out into the harbourat Cass Bay in a tumbled black reef. It does notrequire a great effort of imagination to reconstructthat fire-cup as it must have appeared in the erawhen the fantastic hills were still in the making andshaping. The Maoris, with a quick eye for suchsignificant topographical features, gave the place aname which blends history with legend, “Wheke’sSleeping Place.” Indeed, that strange hollow in thehills might have made fit cradle for a Finn MacCoul.Like the crater-topped cones of the Tamaki Isthmus,it is softly grassed; a stray ngaio is the one remnantof the bush that once covered the volcanic detritus;but the hugely ramparted and square-hewn rim of[4]the basin stands indomitable and unchangeable, unmistakablememorial of the active volcanic age. Suchbold crags are “the eyebrows of the hills”; they givewhat would otherwise be tame landscapes dignity andforce and wildness, and an exploration of these fastnessesof Nature so near our doors, and opened up bythe Summit Road, is not merely pleasurable, but isfruitful in an intelligent appreciation of the amazingforces which helped to mould the land in which welive.

All along the fire-fused line of these SummitPeaks from the Lighthouse to the Seven Sleepersand beyond there are amazingly bold bits of rockand cliff scenery—abrupt escarpments like hugeredoubt walls, bearded with mountain flax, andflakey from the attack of ages of winter frosts;straight smooth cleavages that seem almost artificial,so sharply and finely are they worked byNature, the great sculptor; rounded buttresses likeenormous pillars shoring up the mountain side;caves here and there, old bubbles in the moltenlava, caves that might have sheltered some cannibalhighwayman in the days of stone club and face-tattoo;strangely shapen projections of the cliff-edge,some remindful of animal forms; tomahawkfaces of grey storm-beaten rhyolite dipping downinto the green arms of the little woods where thetui’s rich echoing “bing-bong” and gurglingchuckle are still heard in the shady depths whenthe bush fruits are ripe. Here and there a littlewatercourse, its fountain-head waters drippingsilently from some cool crevice in the rocks, allarboured over by the matted roofing ofkotukutuku, twisty and witchy of branch, andmahoe and glossy-green karaka of the plenteousfoliage. Watercourses that fit the bold mountain

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[Pg 6]

pictures about them; dry in summer, they comedown in tumultuous little cataracts in time of heavyrain, plunging over the piled fragments of lavarocks, and filling for a day or two the age-wornpockets and pools and “pot-holes” in the windingvalleys all arched over with the close-growinglight timber. Deep down in these twisting gulliesbelow the straight cut harbour-facing cliffs, therelingers still a certain quality of primitiveness and asuggestion of the ancient adventure; an atmospherestill in keeping with the legendry of these Hills.Here in the leaf-thatched hollows of Taungaharaor the woven thickets that blanket the precipicefronts of the Seven Sleepers still shall you haveintimate glimpses of wild nature. Up on thetussock-swarded mountains of the hawk and deepin the sudden valleys still may you, though so nearto the City, breathe the mind-refreshing fragranceof the grand out-of-doors, hold healthy communewith

THE PORT HILLS AND THEIR NAMES.

It is the Port Hills’ nomenclature, perhaps, thatcarries the most poetic suggestions of any of theCanterbury place-names, and here, perhaps, thedwellers on the heights in the days to come when allthese Plain-ward-looking slopes are dotted with prettyhomes, will seek inspiration in such legendry andhistory of the soil as we of the present generationhave preserved. There are names of dignity andbeauty clustered about those old lava-built cragsand ruined towers and tors past which the SummitRoad goes a thousand feet above the city.

Finest of all is the Maori name of Castle Rock,that from one point in the Heathcote Valley lookslike a colossal howitzer threatening the Plains. Tothe old Maoris it was Te Tihi o Kahukura, “TheCitadel of Kahukura,” otherwise “The Pinnacle ofthe Rainbow.” The explanation brings in areference to the religion of the tattooed paganpioneers who explored those hills and plains, andplanted their palisaded hamlets by creek-side andin the sheltered folds of the ranges. Kahukura—Uenukuin the North Island—was the principal deityfor what may be termed everyday use among theancient Ngai-Tahu. He was the spirit guardianmost frequently invoked by the tohungas , and hewas appealed to for auguries and omens in time ofwar. Each hapu had its image of Kahukura, asmall carved wooden figure, which was kept insome tapu place remote from the dwellings, oftena secluded flax clump, or on a high, stilt-leggedplatform or whata. The celestial form of Kahukurawas the rainbow; literally the name means[8]“Red Garment.” Omens were drawn in days ofwar from the situation of the arch of the “RedGarment” when it spanned the heavens. The nameis sometimes applied to that phenomenon of days ofmist in the mountains, the “sun-dog,” from whichauguries were drawn. So when the Natives gavethe term to the Castle Rock they were conferringupon it a name of high tapu befitting its bold andcommanding appearance.

And this is not the only Hills name that holds amemory of the cult of the Rainbow-God. On thetussocky slope where the track goes over from theSt. Martins tram terminus to the Summit Roadabove Rapaki, joining the hill track near WitchHill, the tohungas kept in a sacred place one of thewooden figures representing Kahukura, for karakia ,consultation in time of need, and the spotbecame known as “Te Irika o Kahukura,” or “TheUplifting of the Rainbow God.” In time the namewas applied to the Cashmere Hills generally. Andthe lofty Sugarloaf peak immediately to the northof Dyer’s Pass, was Te Heru o Kahukura, whichbeing interpreted, is “Kahukura’s Head-Comb.”So the olden folk occasionally displayed a fine tastein names; and although some of those names maybe a trifle long for pakeha use it would be well tosave them from oblivion.

Otokitoki—“The Place of Axes”—is the name ofGodley Head, the lofty cliff upon which the lighthousestands; its early-days pakeha name wasCachalot Head. Working south from the lighthousewe presently come to the deep bay of Te Awa-parahi,where a little farmstead stands in its well-hiddennest, between the lowering peaks. NearerLyttelton, just where the Zigzag Road goes overEvans Pass to Sumner, are the precipitous

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[10]

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summit rocks of Tapuwaeharuru, “The ResoundingFootsteps,” a place-name met within more than one locality in the volcaniccountry of the North. Far below is the little indentof Te Awa-toetoe, or “Pampas-grass stream”near the artillery barracks. Mount Pleasant, where aNgati-Mamoe

pa

once stood, was known to theMaoris as Tauhinu-Korokio, a combination of twonames of shrubs common to the ranges. PassingCastle Rock—Te Tihi o Kahukura—just on theright hand or west as we travel towards Dyer’sPass, we have on the other hand Te Moenga oWheke, or “Wheke’s Sleeping Place” and Ota-ranui,or “Big Peak,” the towering rough-hewncrests of the Range looking down on Cass Bay andlying east of the Summit Track. Then comes WitchHill, with “The Ashes of Tamatea’s Camp Fire,”of which a legend later, and Te Poho o Tamatea, or“Tamatea’s Breast,” overlooking the Rapaki nativesettlement.

Oketeupoko, or, to divide it into its componentwords, O-kete-upoko, is the Maori name of therocky heights immediately above the town of Lyttelton.It means “The Place of the Basket ofHeads.” A sufficiently grim name this, remindfulof the Whanga-raupo’s red and cannibal past, forthe heads were human ones. When the oldenwarrior Te Rangi-whakaputa set out to make theshore of the Raupo Harbour his own, he encounterednumerous parties of Ngati-Mamoe, who putup a fight for their homes and hunting-grounds.One of these parties of the tangata-whenua , thepeople of the land, he met in battle on the rockybeach of Ohinehou where the white man’s breakwatersand wharves now stand. He worsted them,and the heads of the slain he and his followers[12]hacked off with their stone patus and axes. Some,those of the chief men, Te Rangi-whakaputa placedin a flax basket, and, bearing them up to thecraggy hill-crest that towered above the beach, heset them down on a lofty pinnacle, an offering tohis god of battles. There they were left, say theMaoris, he kai mo te ra, mo te manu —“food for thesun and for the birds.” “O” signifies “the placeof,” “kete” basket and “upoko” head, and thuswas the place named, to memorise the tattooedbrown conqueror of old and the ancient peoplewhom he dispossessed on the shores of the Whangaraupo.

Orongomai, a melodious name when properly pronounced,is the old Ngai-Tahu name of Cass Peak, therhyolite height which lifts 1780 ft. above the waters ofGovernor’s Bay, overlooking the remnant of theancient forest at Kennedy’s Bush. It means “ThePlace Where Voices are Heard,” or, literally,“Place of Sounding-hitherward.” The name hasfittingly enough been given by Mr. Ell tothe stone house for visitors which stands underthe ribbonwood trees at the head of the Kennedy’sBush Valley. The story is that when Te Rangi-whakaputaand his followers landed, in their searchfor the Ngati-Mamoe, after taking the pa at Ohinetahi,in Governor’s Bay, the scouts entered the bush, andat the foot of Cass Peak heard the voices of a partyof men in the bush; these men were Ngati-Mamoe,who had come across from their pa at Manuka, onthe plains side of the range. Led by the scouts—thetorotoro—the invaders rushed upon the Ngati-Mamoesome of whom they killed. The survivors fled overthe hills to Manuka, a large pa which it is believedstood on a knoll at the foot of the range not far fromTai Tapu. (Mr. Ell, on being told of this tradition,[14]said that he believed the site of Manuka would befound to be the spur running into an old swampupon which Mr. Holmes’s homestead is built, onthe old coach road south of Lansdowne, and abouttwo miles from Tai Tapu.) The Manuka village,although a strong defensive position, was stormed andtaken by Te Rangi-whakaputa. In the vicinity, it issaid by the Maoris, there was a shallow cave under therocky hillside which was used by some of the Ngati-Mamoeas a dwelling-place; it is known in traditionas Te Pohatu-whakairo, or “The Carved Rock.” Nodoubt it was so called from the natural markingssometimes seen on the faces of these overhangingrock shelters, such as were used as dwelling andcamping-places in many parts of the South Island bythe ancient people.

Ohinetahi[1] pa , defended with a palisade of splittree-trunks and with ditch and parapet, stood nearthe shore at the head of Governor’s Bay two hundredyears ago. After the place had been captured fromthe Ngati-Mamoe by Te Rangi-whakaputa, his sonManuwhiri occupied it with a party of Ngai-Tahu.This chief Manuwhiri had many sons, but only onedaughter, and he named his pa after his solitarygirl, “The Place of the One Daughter.” TheGovernor’s Bay school now occupies the spot wherethis long-vanished stockaded hamlet stood.

[1] This name was adopted by the late T. H. Potts for his stone house at Governor’sBay, directly below Kennedy’s Bush.

[15]

The name of Cooper’s Knobs, the highest of thethree tooth-like crags lifting abruptly above the headof Lyttelton Harbour to an altitude of 1880 feet,memorises, like so many others, an incident of thehead-hunting cannibal days. After the Rangi-whakaputaand his merry men had conquered thevarious Ngati-Mamoe pas around the harbour, they

[16]

found frequent diversion in hunting out straymembers of the fugitive

hapus

and converting themto a useful purpose through the medium of the oven.Often there were bush skirmishes, and although theNgati-Mamoe frequently put up a good fight, theyusually got the worst of the encounter. Mawete, thechief of Ngati-Mamoe, and a party of men fromManuka

pa

were on their way across the range toLyttelton Harbour to fish for sharks when they wereambuscaded in the bush just below Cooper’s Knobsby a band of Ngai-Tahu warriors. The Ngati-Mamoechief and most of his followers were killed in theskirmish that followed, with the Maori weapons ofwood and stone, the spear, the

taiaha

, and the sharp-edged

patu

, and their bodies went into the oven, forthe Maori’s commissariat in that age was the flesh ofhis foeman. And the Mamoe leader’s name stillclings to that wild craggy spot where he met his deathblow, for the peak which the

pakeha

has namedCooper’s Knobs was called by the Ngai-Tahu conquerorsOmawete, meaning the place where Mawetefell.

Beyond again are the peaks of Otuhokai and TeTara o Te Raki-tiaia; below the harbour head curvesinto the bay of Te Rapu. Next as we go up to meetthe hills of Banks Peninsula is the bold precipice ofTe Pari-mataa, or “Obsidian Cliff,” with the greatvolcanic dyke of Otarahaka, and then our presentpilgrimage ends, for we are right under the hugelyparapeted castle hill of Te Ahu-patiki—Mt. Herbert—withits level top, where a lofty pa of Ngati-Mamoestood three centuries ago.

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Cooper’s Knobs Dog’s Head Pinnacle Hill

Te Whaka-raupo is the ancient name of Port Cooperor Lyttelton Harbour. The name sometimes has beengiven as Te Waka-raupo, which means “The Canoeof Raupo reeds,” otherwise a raft or mokihi of the[18]type so often used on the South Island rivers. This,however, is not correct. “Whaka” here is the Ngai-Tahudialectical form of “Whanga,” which is aharbour or bay, as in Whangaroa and Whanganui.Whaka-raupo, therefore, means “Harbour of theraupo reed.” The tino or exact place from which theharbour takes this name is Governor’s Bay, at thehead of which there was a swamp filled with a thickand high growth of these reeds. It was here, at thehead of Governor’s Bay, that the stockaded pa Ohinetahistood; it was occupied by Te Rangi-whakaputa’sson after the dispersal of the Ngati-Mamoe tribe inthese parts more than two hundred years ago.

Corsair Bay and Cass Bay, as the Kaumatua ofRapaki tells us, have Maori names which contain areference not only to the ancient forests which clothedthe slopes of the Port Hills and descended to thesandy beachside, but to one of the vanished practicesof the native people, fire-making by wood-friction.Corsair Bay was named by Te Rangi-whakaputa,Motu-kauati-iti, meaning “Little Fire-making Tree-grove,”and Cass Bay was Motu-kauati-rahi, or“Great Fire-making Tree-grove.” The bays were sodesignated because on the shores and the slopes abovethere were plentiful thickets of the kaikomako (pennantia corymbosa), the small tree intowhich Mahuika, a Polynesian Prometheus, threwfire from his finger-tips, so that it should not beextinguished by Maui’s deluge. A myth which to theMaori quite satisfactorily accounts for the readinesswith which fire can be obtained from the kaikomako by the simple process of taking a dry block of thewood and rubbing a groove in it with a stick of hardwood—with,of course an incantation to give morepower to the elbow—until the dust and the shavingsbecome ignited. The kaikomako wood is used as the[19]kauati , the piece which is rubbed; the pointed rubbingstick which the operator works to and fro is thekaurima . Motu in these two names is a tree-clump orgrove. There are none of the ancient fire trees onthe bay shores nowadays; the pakeha’s pinus insignisand co*cksfoot grass have long supplanted them.

Ri-papa is the full and correct name of RipaIsland, in Lyttelton Harbour. It is an historic andappropriate name, carrying one back to the ancientdays when the brown sailors hauled their long canoesup on its little shelving beach. Ri means a rope, thepainter of flax by which canoes were dragged up onshore, and papa is a flat rock. Ripapa is a whiteman’s fort these days, but centuries before a Britishgun was planted there it was a fortified place, thoughthe weapons of its garrison would hardly carry asfar as those of the present coast defence force. TheNgati-Mamoe three hundred years ago had a smallvillage on this rocky islet, commanding the harbour-gate;it was defended with a palisade. But whenthe Rangi-whakaputa conquered the inhabitants ofTe Whaka-raupo, he took the island and named itRipapa—its first name is forgotten—and he builta pa on the spot where the fort of the pakeha artillery-mennow stands.

Quail Island, the dark-cliffed isle of the lepers,is known by the Maoris as Otamahua. Herein is areference to an era when the island was a birdingground of the olden race. Many sea-birds, gulls andpuffins and divers, bred in the crannies of its fire-maderocky shores, and the mainland Maoris canoedacross on fowling expeditions. The eggs (hua ) of thesea-fowl were esteemed delicacies, especially by thechildren (tamariki ), who were fond of roasting themon their island expeditions. Manu-huahua , or birdscooked and preserved in their own fat, and[20]done up in sea-kelp receptacles, as is the way in theStewart Island mutton-bird industry to-day, alsoformed a large portion of the native supply of winterfood in these parts.

Looking out from the Port Hills the olden Maoriwayfarer surveyed the far-spreading Plains and thename handed down from the days of the Waitahatribe, the forerunners of the Ngati-Mamoe, came tohis lips: “Nga Pakihi Whakatekateka a Waitaha.”It is a barbed-wire fence, perhaps, to the averagepakeha, yet abbreviated it is not inappropriate asa Plains homestead name. In the long ago, beforewater-races and artesian wells, the trails across thePlains from the Waimakariri to the Selwyn andthe Selwyn to the Rakaia and the Ashburton wereweary and thirsty tracks, for there were very fewsprings of drinking water and the Maori dislikedthe water of the cold glacial torrents. So the tiredand thirsting trail-parties, swagging it across thewastes of tussock and cabbage trees, came to callthe district “The Deceptive Plains of Waitaha,”for they discovered that it was unwise to rely uponsprings and streams on the long tramp. They madewater-bags of seaweed, the great bull kelp, whichthey split and made watertight, and these poha henceforth became as necessary to the kit of atrans-“Pakihi” traveller as a water-bottle is to thesoldier in the field to-day.

The Heathcote River, whose native name has beenabbreviated to Opawa, was originally theOpaawaho, which means “The outer, or seaward,pa ,” otherwise “An outpost.” A tribe-section orhapu of the Ngai-Tahu, about two hundred yearsago, built a village on the left bank of the river,on a spot slightly elevated above the surroundingswampy country; the exact spot must have been

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close to the present Opawa Railway Station. Thename of the village was Poho-areare, or “pigeonbreasted,” after some chief of those days, and itwas because of its situation, the outermost

Kainga

of the Plains and swamp dwellers, commandingthe passage down the Heathcote to thesea, that the river became known as the stream of“The Outpost.” Here it may be recalled that the

hapus

who lived where Christchurch City nowstands were given a nickname by the outer tribesat Kaiapoi and elsewhere. They were called“O-Roto-Repo,” or more briefly, “O-Roto-re’,”which means “In the Swamp,” or the “Swamp-Dwellers.”They lived in a marshy region whichhad its compensations in the way of abundant food,for the swamps and creeks swarmed with eels andwild duck. The upper part of the Heathcote wasthe O-mokihi or “The Place of Flax-Stalk Rafts.”The

tino

of the name, the place where it had itsorigin, was an ancient lagoon-swamp at the foot ofthe Cashmere Hills, which the river drained.Another version of the Heathcote name is Wai-Mokihi,or “Flax-stalk Raft Creek.” Lower downthe Heathcote, where the broad tidal shallows are,the Maoris gave the place an equally appropriatename; they called it O-hikaparuparu, which maybe translated as “The spot where So-and-so fellin the mud,” or “Stick-in-the-mud,” which servesequally well to-day. About Redcliffs, where the tramlinepasses round from the broads and under the greatcave-riddled lava precipice, there belongs a ratherbeautiful name, Rae-Kura, which is more modern thanmost of the other Native designations. It means “Red-glowingHeadland,” or, let us say, “Rosy Point.”

Immeasurably more ancient is Rapanui, whichis the name of Shag Rock, in the Estuary; a place-name[23]that could very well be appropriated by some ofthe near-by residents. It is a far-travelled name,for it was brought by the first Maori immigrantsfrom Hawaiki, just as our white settlers broughttheir Canterburys and Heathcotes and Avons withthem. We find it on the map of the Pacific somethousands of miles away; it is one of the Nativenames of Easter Island, that strange relic of adrowned Polynesian land in Eastern Oceania. Andfurther out still, there is Tuawera, the Cave Rockat Sumner, to which belongs a legend of love andwizardry and revenge, to be narrated at another time,in which the chief figures were a girl from Akaroanamed Hine-ao or “Daughter of the Dawn,” thechief Turaki-po, of “The Outpost” village, and TeAke, the tohunga of Akaroa.

ROUND THE SUGARLOAF.

“THE CREST OF THE RAINBOW.”

The saying that the best place to see the mountainsis from below, not from their summits, mayproperly be qualified in its application to our PortHills by the opinion that the finest view of thecraggy range of old volcanic upjuts is that to behad from a few hundred feet below the rangecrest, on the Lyttelton Harbour side. Really toappreciate the special and peculiar beauty of thehills, with their nippled peaks and crags and theirage-weathered cliffs, one must travel along theLyttelton-Governor’s Bay road rather than viewthe range from the Plains, where the smoothed andsettled ridges, like a series of long whalebacks, givelittle hint of the sudden rocky wildness of theprecipitous dip to the harbour slopes. There, onthe white road that curves along the hillsides wellabove the waters of the Whanga-Raupo, it is easyto understand something of the fiery history ofthese hills, when the hollow that now is LytteltonHarbour was one terrific nest of volcanoes and whenthe tremendous forces of confined steam and gaseshurled whole mountain-tops skyward and helped togive savage shape to the walls of rhyolite rock thatstand to-day little altered by the passage of theuntold centuries of years. Better still, truly tounderstand this most wonderful part of Canterbury,one should make a traverse of the upper partsof the eastern dip by the new tracks, two or threehundred feet below the pinnacles of the ridge. Off

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[26]

the tracks if you care for the exercise there is rock-climbingin plenty and there are scrambles underthe low-growing trees and along steep faces hangingon to the flax clumps and the tough-branched

koromiko

. And at about this level on the Hillsside there are aspects of crag scenery, and crag andwoodland combined, that are altogether missed bythe stroller who keeps to the beaten track. OurChristchurch artists need not go further away thanthe inner dip of the range, the battered rim of theancient fire cauldron, for impressions of bold rockfaces straightly grand and honeycombed withcurious caves, and witchy-looking weathered oldtrees; pictures that approach grandeur when thestorm clouds swirl about the tussock-topped tors ofKahukura, the Rainbow God, giving the dark coresof the olden volcanoes an added height and mystery,or when they drift softly and mistily from thedeep gullies between the ridges like steam massesfrom some hidden geyser.

The Mitchell Track that winds along northwardbetween the tumbled rocks and among the hill flaxgives the explorer a start on his traverse fromDyer’s Pass. It begins just opposite the picturesquestone-built tea-house with its swinging signboardand its quaint inscriptions in the saddle of thePass, and it splendidly opens up the seaward face ofthe Sugarloaf whose rounded summit lifts directlyover us yonder more than 1,600 feet above the harbourlevel. Immediately below us, in the gully that longago was a channel for lava flow, the rocky depthsare softened by the foliage of a fragment of theolden bush, a green covering for the valley floor.The valley is more attractive outside, for almostevery vestige of the moss and ferns and underbrushhas disappeared before grazing stock and the

[27]

[28]

sudden torrents that have poured down from theridge to make the little storm-creek flowing into theharbour beside the grassy mound of Pa-rakiraki.The lava-builded, notched and caverned walls ofthe Sugarloaf shoot up above us just here like aparapet, in regularly marked layers; tufts of flaxand tussock and wiry veronica beard the face ofthe old fire-cliffs. Looking back at the Pass, justbefore we round the first bend in the rocky traverse,the cliff makes a terraced halt in its descent, andhere on this tussock-grown tiny level, broideredwith flax bushes and their honey-sweet

korari

blossoms, there is an eye-taking prospect of theDyer’s Pass dip to the soft-blue sunlit harbour andof the black rock-faces and strong folds of the PortHills southward.

Immediately southward of the Pass road the landgoes easily swelling up into Marley’s Hill, a littlehigher than our Sugarloaf, and now a story of old-timeexplaining the meaning of the Maori name ofthat airy saddle comes to mind.

The original name of the ridge leading southwardfrom Dyer’s Pass, and including Marley’s Hill, saysHone Taare Tikao of Rapaki, is Otu-Tohu-Kai,which being translated is “The Place Where theFood Was Pointed Out.” The tradition is thatnearly two centuries ago, when the Ngai-Tahu fromthe North conquered this part of the country fromthe Ngati-Mamoe, a chief named Waitai ascendedthis height from Ohinetahi (now Governor’s Bay),taking with him Manuwhiri and other of thechildren of the chief Te Rangi-whakaputa who hadtaken possession of the harbour shores, in order topoint out to them the good things of the greatPlains. Waitai had already explored the country,and was able to tell of its worth as a home for Ngai-Tahu.

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When Waitai and his companions emerged fromthe bush and topped the lofty round of the range,he halted, and bade them look out over the wide,silent country. He pointed to the reedy lagoonsand streams that silvered the flax and tussockdesert, where Christchurch City and its suburbsnow spread out leisurely and shade off into therural lands, and said: “Yonder the waters are thickwith eels and lampreys, and their margins withducks and other birds; in the plains beyond thereare wekas for the catching.” The Plains, as heshowed them, were plentifully studded with the ti-palm,from which the sugary kauru could beobtained. Then, turning in the other direction, hespoke of the fish-teeming waters of theharbour, where flounders, shark, and otherkai-matai-tai , “food of the salt sea,” were to behad in abundance. Such were the foods of thisWai-pounamu; and so good seemed the land tothose conquistadors as they stood there on the windyheight surveying the great new country fallen intotheir hands, that they decided to remain in sopromising a place; and it is their descendants whopeople Rapaki and other kaingas to-day.

Now we turn and, passing a rugged cornice inthe lava wall, descend into the gully to examine forourselves the tree-covering of old Kahukura’sshoulders. There is a thick growth of flax on thelittle terraces and steep slopes above the bush, andin one place we force our way through a regularjungle of it, growing so thickly as almost toencourage the idea that a flax-mill would findprofitable business here. Some of the tallkorari stalks are well in flower and bees are busy;on others the long dark-sheathed buds are justunfolding. Flax-flower honey-water makes a[30]pleasant enough drink, and the Boy Scout tastesand pronounces it good. There is a pretty Maorilove-lament in which a girl compares her sorrowingself to this blossom of the flax:

“My eyes are like the wind-waved korari blossoms;when the breeze shakes the flowers down fallthe honey showers; so flow my tears.”

A little lower and we are in the bush, taking careas we enter it to give a wide berth to the insinuatingMaori nettle, the ongaonga , with its unhealthy-lookinglight-coloured leaves covered with a thickgrowth of fine spines or hairs. The Boy Scout sidleswarily past those bushes of ongaonga when he istold of its poisonous qualities, and of an experiencethe narrator had with it years ago in the KingCountry bush. Away up yonder, in the OhuraValley, between the open lands of the King Countryand Taranaki, the ongaonga grew into tall shrubs,ten or twelve feet high, and its virulence apparentlywas in proportion to its growth. All of ourexploring party were more or less badly stung andsuffered the effects for a day or two, but the unfortunatehorses suffered most. Two of them went madwith the poisonous stings, which swelled their sidesand legs, and a pack-horse actually drowned itselfby bolting into a creek and lying down in the waterin its desperate need of ease from the pain. Reallybad ongaonga stings provoke feverish sickness; andso it is prudent to make a detour on these hillslopes rather than encounter over-closely even theseinsignificant little specimens. If you are on asteep, slippery slope and reach out for a hand-grip,as likely as not instead of a friendly flax ortussock bunch the ongaonga will be there waitingfor you with his devilish little stinging hairs. Anddon’t attempt to apply to our Maori Land nettle theamiable counsel of old Aaron Hill that was givenout to us in our school days:—[31]

Don’t, if you value your skin, try that on theongaonga.

The Seven Sleepers

Lower down, however, the way is clear of thisbush plague, and we find ourselves under a shadyroof of thick foliage, woven of the cool green leavesof the broadleaf, a small puka , the mahoe andkowhai and other minor trees of the Maori bushwith much of the kotukutuku , the native fuchsia,now come into flower, with its masses of slenderpendulous blossom giving promise of abundantkonini berries for the birds. (Like several otherNew Zealand trees the fruit of the kotukutuku isgiven a different name from the plant itself.) Thegraceful lacebark or ribbonwood, too, is here inplenty; there are some beautiful specimens on thesehills and slopes, and finest of all perhaps is thegrand old houi that overshades the little MaoriChurch at Rapaki. Aka vines interlace the close-growingtrees and here and there present tanglingobstacles to a passage along the gully sides. Theplace lacks the softness of moss and fern underfootto which we are accustomed in the real bush; neverthelessit has something of the atmosphere of theolden forest wild; grateful bush scents are in ournostrils, the leaf-covering is close, though the treesare not tall, and the twisting character of growthand the matting of creepers help to make compactthe tentage of green.

Making north-east with the general curve of theSugarloaf slopes we leave the first bush patch and,[33]breasting another wild garden of flax, with hereand there a cabbage-tree sweetening the air withits creamy flowers, discover a deep trend to thenorth-west into the main valley. Here, under asteep-to uplift of the ancient igneous rock, curvingout above our heads in savage cornices and rudeattempts at gargoyles, we look down upon a pictureof surprising beauty, one of the many surprisesfolded in among these Port Hills.

On this side of the Heru-o-Kahukura the range isdeeply bitten into by a cup-shaped valley, with one[34]side of the cup, that facing the harbour, cut awayfor the passage of the old lava streams and nowthe rainy season watercourses. The inside of thevalley, too, is given the semblance of a fan by thenumerous converging tributary gullies, separatedby grassy and flax-grown ridges. There are perhapshalf a dozen of these subsidiary valleys, and eachone is filled with a sweet green mass of light bushsimilar to that behind us. The higher the littlevalleys, too, the more bush there is; the gullybottoms are hidden everywhere with many tintedfoliage, a taller tree here and there protruding itshead above its fellows, and these remnants of theancient forest climb to the very parapets of darkand grey rock that seem to form the main defencesof Kahukura’s citadel. The curving lines converge,the shouldering ridges fall away as the now drywatercourses blend into one hundreds of feet belowthe rocky elbow of ours.

It is perhaps half a mile across the main gullyand we fix a course for the Summit track on theridge northwards and strike down through thebush. Here in the shadowy depths there is somebird life; the trill of the riroriro , the little greywarbler, is almost constant, and an occasional fantailflits about us; but the thrush is more numerousthan any native bird. When the bush bird-foodsare ripe the tui sometimes pays this valley a visitfrom larger woodland tracks. There is acurious wildness in the valley bottom under thethicknesses of the broadleaf and the mahoe andkotukutuku ; it is half-dark in the deepest part,and great rocks lie hurled about, fire-born andwater-worn. The floods that sometimes tear downhave worn pot-holes here and there, and thereare shallow caves obscured by tangles of roots and

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[36]coiling stems. There is a venerable kotukutuku , awizard of a tree, its whitened bark hanging instrips like shaggy bits of beard, its trunk allknotted and twisted, standing sentry at the entranceto a little dusky cavern; its misshapen branches,storm-battered, go searching around the broken topof the black and grey rock. Other of the treestake goblin-like shapes, and stretch out their bareroots and feelers, unsoftened by carpet of moss orferns, to trip the intruder into their dim solitudes.It is but a little bit of a wood, this bush in thegully, but its aloofness and solitariness are madecomplete by the close-growing habit of the smalltimber and the great tossed-about rocks thathelp to seclude it. Totara of some size, weobserve, once grew here; there is the tall, smoothbarrel of a tree now dead. In the next main gullyto the northward, the Taungahara bush, on theNative reserve, there is at least one fine totara , andsome big fellows were cut down there not so verylong ago by the Rapaki people for fencing posts.

As we make upwards, with care evading thediabolical ongaonga that haunts the bush outskirts,we strike a steep face, with here and there adripping of water glistening on the moss-crustedrock and on the little flax and koromiko plants thatroot themselves in tiny crevices. To gain the gradedand formed track again, we swarm up the fifty-footcliff, with koromiko and aka and flax for hand-grips.Above there is a jungle of koromiko , a veronicawhich here assumes sub-alpine habit, and weavesa wire entanglement, fortunately minus the barbs—thetataramoa or bush-lawyer in the thicket belowsupplies those in plenty. The butte here is toppedby a rock formation so regular and resemblinga ruined fortification that the Boy Scout opines it[37]would be a splendid place for a fight, and certainlythe old shattered tor of the fire-kings, with itscopses of wire-branched koromiko and its thickflax-clumps, suggests itself as a first-rate naturalredoubt, where a few riflemen might hold outamong their rocks and shrubby cover against ascore of times their number.

The little bush on either hand here runs almostto the ridge top, and we come suddenly out of thekoromiko thicket on to the great cave-wornramparts and have a clear track to the SummitRoad again. The picture from the breezy ridge isworth the warm scramble up through the mattedbit of woodland. The long smooth rolls of hills godown to the Plains on the one hand; on the otherthe harbour and beyond the cloud-belted heights ofthe Peninsula. A misty shower is sweeping overthe far indigo hills, and a rainbow shines out,grandly spanning a sector of the Peninsula, fromthe back of Purau to the ocean. And as we turnsouthward the thought comes, observing the evenlysymmetrical round-sweep of the Sugarloaf summitfrom here, that the Maoris of old-time, who, likethe ancient Incas saw in the rainbow the personificationof a deity, may very well have caught fromthe peak’s likeness to the iris arch the poetic fancythat induced them to name it Te Heru-o-Kahukura,“The Comb (or crest) of the Rainbow God.”

By way of the easy return trail, we work backsouthward under the upper cliffs. Out near thePass the crannied walls of old Kahukura echo tothe voices of a party of girls, a botany class fromthe city. The instructor is improving the half-holidaywith a practical talk on the native flora, andtwenty notebooks are out and pencils busy.

[38]

“This,” announces the mentor as the classclusters round, “is a very peculiar plant, Urticaferox, so called because——”

“Wow!” interrupts one of the earnest learners,as she stoops to rub a plump ankle.“It stingslike billy-oh!” She has made the acquaintance ofthe truculent ongaonga .

—Shakespeare.

[2] Carved above the porch of the Summit Road Rest House on Dyer’s Pass.

RAPAKI: A VILLAGE BY THE SEA.

In the little Maori kainga of Rapaki, folded away ina valley-fan of Lyttelton harbour-side, there is a tiny,steep-roofed church, of old-fashioned build, and bythe side of this church stands a twisty-branched oldribbonwood tree, that in summer showers over porchand steeple its sweet, snowy blossoms, scented like theorange tree. On the lowermost bough of this knottyribbonwood, the houhi , or houi , of the Natives, thatstood here before the church was built, over fiftyyears ago, hangs the bell that calls the remnant ofNgati-Irakehu to worship; and it is this sylvan belfrythat symbolises for me the intermingling of modernismand ancientry in the Rapaki of to-day. Like the otherhapus of the Ngai-Tahu tribe, the Ngati-Irakehu andtheir kin are now half-pakeha in blood; they haveintermarried with their European neighbours, andtheir little township, with its sixty odd souls, isscarcely to be taken at first sight for a Maori settlement.The communal house, of characteristic Nativebuild, with its carved frontal barge-boards and itsgargoyle-like tekoteko perched above the entrance,familiar to travellers in the Native districts of theNorth, is wanting here; but a survey of the villagescheme, with its tree-shaded cottages grouped sociablyabout the central green space, and the hall and school-houseand church, soon makes it plain that here stoodan old-time Maori kainga , of totara slabs and raupothatch, with maybe a tall stockade guarding its landwardside and stretching from cliff to cliff of the littleboulder-beached bay. The plan is the same; thebuildings have changed, for Rapaki to-day believes in[40]

sanitation and modern comforts. Here and there aMaori tree, like our ribbonwood yonder, and a tatteredclump of light bush in the gullies or on a rocky cliff-top,to remind us of the different setting when Rapakiwas tumultuous with wild Maori life; when tattooedNgai-Tahu were in fighting flower, and when denseand beautiful forest covered the feet and shoulders ofall those dark volcanic crags and tors lifting above us[41]there like so many ruined castles battered by theartillery fire of the gods. A remnant, a morehu , noware tribe and forest; alike they have dwindled to ashadow; “as the woods are swept away,” says theMaori, “so shall the people vanish.” The youngpeople are so Anglicised that they use the pakeha tongue chiefly; the older ones only cling to Maoriamong themselves. Yet a brave little remnant, witha fighting heart worthy of their warrior ancestry; forof these descendants of fierce old Rangiwhakaputaand Wheke every eligible young man went to theGreat War, and some salted with their bones theworld’s greatest battlefields. (No Kipling monopolyin the phrase: “Bury me here,” said old MajorPokiha, of the Arawa, a fighting chief of the lastgeneration—“bury me here as salt for the lands ofmy heroes”). One-eighth of the population of littleRapaki voluntarily enlisted. The well-pluckedNgati-Irakehu and their kinsmen have title to say,as Nelson said of old of his fighting sailors, “We arefew, but the right sort.”

The Kaumatua of Rapaki, the pleasant-manneredkindly greybeard, Hone Taare Tikao, a gentleman oftrue rangatira breeding and demeanour, is the bestinformed man of his tribe-remnant on the Peninsulaand Port Hills history and legends and genealogicalrecitals—whakapapa in the Maori tongue. Tikao wasborn at Akaroa over seventy years ago. He is of theNgati-Irakehu hapu of the Ngai-Tahu tribe, and he isdescended by several lines from Te Rangiwhakaputaand other of the warrior chiefs who wrested theWhanga-raupo and the Whanga-roa—Aka-roa is themodernised contraction—from the dusky men ofNgati-Mamoe. From his parents and from Paora Taki,a picturesque old rangatira who once was Nativeassessor at Rapaki, and kindred people of the[42]generation that has gone, he learned the historyand legends of these parts.

The old man tells us first how this village came tobe named Rapaki—not Raupaki, as it is erroneouslyspelled on the maps. The full name of the place isTe Rapaki-a-Te Rangi-whakaputa which means “thewaist-mat of Te Rangi-whakaputa,” and to it,obviously, there hangs a story, which when told leadson to the tradition of the conquest of this districtfrom the Ngati-Mamoe a little over two centuriesago. The Rangi-whakaputa’s name in these parts isassociated with Homeric exploits with the weapons ofold. This long-gone tattooed hero was the Hector ofthe Whaka-raupo, and this well-hidden valleycurving down from the crags was the spot where hesettled awhile when the harbour-side fighting wasdone. He was one of the northern invaders, a kinsmanand contemporary of Moki, Tu-rakau-tahi, andother baresark warriors of the end of the seventeenthcentury. On the beach below the present village heleft his waist-garment, a kilt of flax or toi leaves,probably in connection with the act of tapa -ing theplace as his possession, and from the fact of thisrapaki , which would be a tapu one, being cast therethe place received its name. Te Rangi-Whakaputa’sname has been translated as “Day of Daring,” or“Day of Energy.” It suited this enterprising warrior,who is described by his descendant Taare Tikao as agreat toa or brave. He was indeed a fine figure of aman, nearer seven feet than six feet high, it is said,very powerful, and a most skilful man in the use ofthe taiaha , the Maori broadsword of hard toughakeake , and the spear and the stone mere . All theseharbour-front villages and camping-grounds he capturedfrom the Ngati-Mamoe who, as Tikao says, werethe fourth iwi —race or tribe—to occupy the

[43]

[44]

South Island; the first people were the Hawea, the secondthe Rapuwai, the third the Waitaha and the fourth theNgati-Mamoe, whom the Ngai-Tahu dispossessed, intheir turn to be supplanted by the white-skins withtheir bags of gold sovereigns and their land-sale deeds.

And this Homeric figure of two centuries ago, greatof stature and terrible in fight, had a son whose nameis scarcely less famous in the little-written traditionsof the conquest of the Whanga-Raupo. His name wasWheke, which means “Octopus,” and like his fatherhe spread terror among the Ngati-Mamoe. With hiswar parties he scoured all these ranges and tracked thefrightened fugitives into their most secret valleys andcaves. One of his camping-grounds on a war expeditionwas yon fort-like nest of basalt towers and upjutsabove Cass Bay, overlooking our Lyttelton road; heslept one night near the summit of one of these crags,a wild hard camping place, and it is still known as“Te-Moenga-o-Wheke” or “Wheke’s Bed.” And overthe doorway of the large meeting hall in the village ofRapaki you will see the name of Wheke painted, inmemory of a brown hero whose bones have been dustthese two hundred years.[3]

When first I went round the high bend in theharbour-side road from Lyttelton and saw Rapakivillage a-slumber in the afternoon sun below, all inits green and gold of groves and flowers, grassy fieldslapped about it in soft folds, the sea coming up ingentle breathings at the foot of the little cliffs, andthe grand old crags above, with one huge taiaha -headof a peak lording it sentry-wise over all, I thoughtthat for beauty of setting very few Maori kaingas evenin the romantic bushlands and highlands of the NorthIsland were peers of this hamlet of the Ngai-Tahu,almost jostled off the map by the crowding hordesof the pakeha . Down the bend into the hollow, wherethe ghost of a mountain stream goes tinkling throughthe little gully, and the towns that are so near seema hundred miles away. The mat-kilted conquistador ofold who gave his name to the place had an eye for asecure, well-hidden site for his pa . He could scarcelyhave chosen a spot more snug about these savagePort Hills. The dominating tors and marline-spikesof fire-born rock and the great up-swell of land on allsides but the sea ward off the cold winds. Loftiest ofall and nearest is that towering spear-head Te Poho-o-Tamatea,[46]a dark grey triangle of rhyolite, thrusting itsnaked apex into the warm sky a thousand feet andmore above the groves and dwellings of Tikao’s people.It looks what it is, the mountain guardian of Rapaki;its presence, grimly grand on dark lowering days whenthe mists trail about it and give it added height anddourness, is no less overpowering in the night, when itleans over the deep-cut valley of dreams, a hugerugged blade of blackness etched against the sky. Andeven in this day of sunshine, when every cave andcranny in the Poho-o-Tamatea were searched by thegolden light and when the mystery of its fiery birthstood revealed, the great spear-rock still seemed a placeof eeriness and tapu .

That old ribbonwood tree that quite overshadowsthe little Rapaki church holds memories of thevanished forests that once clothed all these PortHills and of the “flitting generations of mankind”it has so long outlived. It is a dignified survivor ofthe woodlands of the Rapaki-a-Te Rangi-whakaputa.Once upon a time the indigenous timbers thicklycovered all these now-grassy slopes slanting quicklyfrom the rhyolite hilltop crags to the quiet watersof the Whaka-Raupo. There were big trees—totara ,rimu , kahikatea and mataii —but all havegone long ago. Remains there but a remnant fromthe general slaughter with fire and axe and crosscutsaw—a copse on yonder rocky point on theLyttelton side of the hamlet, where the poeticallynamed ake-rautangi , the ake of the “crying leaves”and a few other shrubs hold their little stony fort;and in Taare Tikao’s garden the kaumatua hassome treasured plants, such as the handsomerau-tawhiri shrub, and the flowering hakeke , avariety of ake , the leaves of which when crushed inthe hand have a lemon-like perfume; the Natives used[47]to boil them for the hinu kakara , the fragrant oilexpressed. But the old ribbonwood, or lacebark, orthousand-jacket, as the bushman variously calls it, isthe tree that takes the eye. The Maoris of the northcall it whauwhi and houhere , here it is houhi or houi .It takes its pakeha name from the peculiar characteristicsof the inner bark, which is tough and strongof fibre and beautifully netted and perforated. Theearly colonists have been known to use it for thetrimming of ladies’ hats and bonnets. I have seen awar-dance party of Taupo Natives, more than ahundred strong, kilted with short rapakis made of thislacebark, deftly twisted and woven by their womenfolkfor the ceremonial leaping parade.

[48]

That is the tree that extends its Maori mana tapu and its twisting flowery branches over the villagechurch, with a little spire like an old-time candleextinguisher, and it was under its shade that Tikaotold something of the past of these parts. The churchitself, as he remembered, was built in 1869 by theWesleyan Natives, but the Anglicans used it also, forin those days there was no puhaehae , no violent jealousyof sects. And in its very shadow, when the sunwesters, is a tangled grassy spot sacred to the memoryof a heathen chief who would have none of the whiteman’s church or the white man’s beliefs. Mahurakiwas his name, a shaggy tattooed pagan of the first halfof the last century. He was exceedingly tapu , steepedin wizardry and mysticism. Often the missionariesbesought him to become a Christian, but the grimold warlock scoffed at the Rongo Pai. “Hu!”he grunted, “what is your Karaiti? Who was he? Mygod is Kahukura, the god whose sign is the rainbow.As for yours, your Karaiti—he is a poriro , a misbegotten!”And at last the sorely pained missionaryabandoned in despair the hopeless task of plucking theancient man from the burning. Mahuraki diedsixty years ago and was buried in a hole dug in thefloor of his thatched hut, which was left to decay. Ashe lived, he died, a sturdy unregenerate pagan, andthe faith of Ihu Karaiti prevailed; the bell of theRongo Pai calls the kainga to prayers within a fewpaces of Mahuraki’s grave, and the tohunga’s mumblings are a forgotten creed. The tohunga himself is by no means forgotten, for one of the namesof yonder lofty arrowhead of a crag that overlordsRapaki is “Mahuraki’s Head.” The original name,as we have seen, is Te Poho-o-Tamatea, which means“Tamatea’s Breast,” so named by this barefootedpioneer of Maori land surveyors by way of claiming[49]the land for his tribespeople. In about 1849-50, whenthe commander of a British surveying ship madethe first survey of Lyttelton Harbour andnamed the landscape saliencies, his Maori interpreterasked the name of this sharp peak, whereupon ourold savage claimed that it was named after himself,“Te Upoko-o-Mahuraki.” It was his way of perpetuatinghis name and fame. But long-distancepedestrian Tamatea fairly has prior claim.

So by the foot of the greenwood tree was begun thetalk of olden days that ended, as the sun declinedbehind the historic crags of Tamatea, on Taare Tikao’shospitable verandah, overlooking the little village andthe soft blue placid waters of the Whaka-Raupo. Itwas a rambling korero , wandering deviously frompakeha times into romantic ancientry, when the wildmen lived in the woods and when war canoes filledwith fierce tattooed eaters of men swept up and downthis shining harbour of ours. The Kaumatua , describingthe old industrious age of his people, told byway of example of the tribal communistic energieshow great flax nets fully a quarter of a mile long usedto be made for the catching of the shark in this seaarm. These immensely long seines were six or eightfeet deep, and were worked by canoes, which wouldtake one end out into mid harbour, the other beingmade fast, and sweep the great kupenga round theshoals of fish making their way up the harbour withthe flood tide. Huge quantities of sharks and otherfish were caught in this manner, a fishing fashionwhich was only possible under the old tribal system,when the whole strength of the hapu was availablefor such tasks.

Lest readers should question the dimensions of thatquarter of a mile seine, let me say that in quite recenttimes, up to within the last thirty-five years or so, an[50]old Ngati-Pikiao chief, the late Pokiha Taranui(better known as Major Fox), had a net nearlya mile in length, which was used on specialoccasions, such as the gathering of food for nativemeetings; the locality was Maketu village, on theshores of the Bay of Plenty. But those enormouskupengas will never again be hauled through the fish-teemingwaters.

From Tikao, too, we hear something of the poeticlegend and nature-myth that steep those swart hillsabove Rapaki. Yon savage Poho of rhyolite, and thepeaked and pinnacled cores of old volcanoes thatbreak through the grassy hills for mile after mile, allhave their tales of pre-pakeha years, of which we shallchronicle something again. Just now we may contentourselves with the gentler scenes in Rapaki valley,where the kowhai has shed its showers of gold and thepakeha fruit trees in blossom sweeten the soft airdeliciously. That patch of ploughed land behind thesettlement before long will show the first shoots ofkaanga , or maize; there is not much grown in thisisland except by the Natives. The water-front, in spiteof its smart new jetty for the launches, is lonelier thanin the old days; for there was a time, long after thewar-canoe era, when three long whaleboats were hauledup on the sand where the boulders are piled asideyonder and often these could be seen pulling down toLyttelton laden with potatoes, corn and fruit. Thatbit of beach is over-rough; but a little way to thenorth, under the lee of a wild bit of a rocky headlandthick with beautiful light bush, is a gem of a whitebeach, clean and hard and shining, a sandy alcove thatmust have been made for picnicking. And from thishillside turn in the road where we get our first glimpseof Rapaki, we may also most fitly take our sunsetfarewell of the kainga of an artist’s dream.

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The sun is over the range, and Tamatea’s gloomypeak is outlined in sharp symmetry against theburning west. In the deep gullies between the spear-headand the ridge of the Sacred Fire the smoky-bluemists are already forming, and wreathing andcreeping around the tangled shrubberies of bush thathave escaped the general massacre. The harbour liesa sheet of scarcely moving tender turquoise, just ashade lighter than the face of the famous Tikitapu,inaccurately called the Blue Lake by the pakeha ; highbeyond the shark’s-teeth of the peaks that someone hasnamed the Seven Sleepers are drawn in soft blue uponthe rose of the heaven above, their feet are bathedin violet, and the purple mists swim wraith-like fromtheir hidden hollows. The sun goes, and the delicacy,the tenderness of colour, the fading of landscapedetails into a haze like the camp-fire smokes of thelegendary Patu-paiarehe , weave a veil of faery overthe valley and the darkening sea. The little boys andgirls of the settlement are still at play around themeeting-hall, and every call and every laugh comeclearly through the velvet soft air. Down in a nearerdwelling, a girl is rehearsing a poi -dance song,and the lilt is familiar, the half-sad chant that begins,

It is the song crooned by the women andthe children in every kainga that, like slumbrous littleRapaki down yonder, sent its young men to userifle and bayonet beside their pakeha brothers-in-armson the thundering battlefields half a world away.

THE “AHI-A-TAMATEA.”

HOW THE SACRED FIRE CAME TO WITCHHILL.

As we travel northward along the Summit Trackfrom the Poho-o-Tamatea, observing from this commandingheight—a thousand feet above little Rapakivillage, lying in its grassy nest below—how thatgreat spearhead of rock has in reality an almostlevel top, we come to a remarkable broken wall ofgrey lava moss-crusted and shrub-tufted, protrudingfrom the grassy flanks of the craggy knoll calledWitch Hill. It is in fact a huge dyke of once-moltenlava, cutting wall-like through the old lava flows andtrending southward across the shoulder of its parenthill. From the very crest of the range it shoots in apalisade of frost-shattered rock, towering thirty feetand more in places above the stone-strewn tussocks,and it stretches some distance in irregular cyclopeansteps down the steep slope towards Rapaki. There isan old stone quarry on the face of Witch Hill, wherethis dyke juts out like a broken castle wall of thePatu-paiarehe , the Dim People of long ago, and justthere the old waggon track goes down over thesmoothed-out hills to the Canterbury Plains and thegreen banks of the Opaawaho.

The Giants’ Causeway some fanciful pakeha hasnamed this wall of lava. To the Maori it is the “Ahi-a-Tamatea”or “the Fire of Tamatea”, and a strangenature legend there is thereto; a folk tale in whichfable and geologic myth are curiously blended. It is avolcano myth which closely resembles, and is no doubt[53]a copy of, the North Island legend of Ngatoro-i-Rangiand the origin of the Ngauruhoe volcano. The marchdownhill of this curious upstanding dyke of lava,grey against the more sombre tints of the range, maybe traced in the masses of lava boulders through whichthe Rapaki water-course has cut its way in its lustierdays. And if you turn your face southward andlook far across the upper part of the harbour,near the western slopes of Mount Herbert,you will plainly see what seems a continuation of theremarkable wall of lava which welled ages ago white-hotfrom the cauldrons of Ruaimoko. Those grey-whiteparapets of fire-made rock are the Ashes of theFires of Tamatea, and this is the wonderful tale ofTamatea and his magic fire, a tale of old which bringsin, too, our great arrowhead peak, towering yonderon Rapaki’s western side, yon huge upjut lording itsentry-wise over the Maori kainga . The peak of“Tamatea’s Breast,” is one of the very few landscapesaliencies in these parts which still remain in the handsof the people of Takitimu descent. A venerable namethis, for it is quite six hundred years old and is aconnecting link with the greatest land-explorer inMaori-Polynesian story, a prototype of the adventurous[54]“Kai-ruri,” the white surveyor of pakeha pioneering days.

Tamatea seems to have been possessed of the true“wander-hunger,” for when he arrived on the shoresof the North Island in his ocean-going canoe theTakitimu (or Takitumu) from his Eastern Pacifichome—Tahiti or one of the neighbouring islands—viaRarotonga—his restless heart impelled him to moreadventure. First making the land in the far north,he voyaged on down the East Coast, sailing andpaddling from bay to bay, leaving here and theresome of his sea-weary crew, who intermarried with theinhabitants, and he did not cease his sailorly enterpriseuntil he had reached the foggy shore of Murihiku, the“Tail of the Land” which the white man calls Southland.Here the Takitimu was hauled ashore and if oneis to accept literally the legend of the Maori, there sheis to be seen now, metamorphosed in marvellousfashion into mountain form, the lofty blue range ofthe Takitimu—mis-spelled “Takitimos” on the mapsand locally spoken of as “the Takitimos.” It iscurious that this isolated range—fairy-haunted innative legend—lifting abruptly on all sides from thetussocky plains that slope to Lake Manapouri, frommore than one point bears a resemblance to the formof a colossal canoe upturned. Legend, too, says thatTamatea settled awhile at the foot of the Canoe Mountains,and that he had a camp village at the lower endof Lake Te Anau, where eels and birds were abundant.

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Then, wearying for the trail and the pikau , he setout on a march which was nothing less than heroic,from Southland to the newly-settled homes of hispeople in the North. With a number of companionsand food bearers the barefooted explorertrudged across country, through the unpeopledtussock prairies of Otago and the plains now known

[56]as Canterbury, fording or swimming the rivers orcrossing them on rude rafts (mokihi ) made ofbundles of flax-stalks or of dried raupo , until hereached the hills that wall in Lyttelton Harbour. Hetravelled along the range-top, as was the way ofthe Maori explorer, until he neared the dip in thesharp ridge at the back of Rapaki, over which theMaoris and the pioneer white men made a track.

Now, Tamatea had carried with him, in a section of a hollowrata log, as was the fashion of the Maori, a smoulderingfire for his nightly camps. No common fire this; it was anahi-tipua , a “magic blaze,” a sacred fire directly kindled fromthat trebly-tapu fire which Uenuku, the great high priest offar Hawaiki, had sent with his canoe voyagers. The Takitimu, being atapu canoe, carried no cooked food, and the only plants thepeople brought in her were ornamental ones, for scent and beauty andsweet flowers. She was a great double canoe, and could carry twohundred people. Her consort was the canoe Arai-te-uru, which carried“Te Ahi-a-Uenuku—Uenuku’s Fire”—and all kinds of food plants, even,says Tikao, a grain which is said to have resembled the pakeha’s wheat. Coming round Te Matau-a-Maui, Hawke’s Bay, the Arai-te-Urunearly capsized; she went over on her side, and continued in thatattitude until she finally overturned at Matakaea Point, near Oamaru,where she still lies—turned to stone! The sacred fire was saved andit was taken by the chiefs up the Waitaki River and placed there inthe ground; and there until about forty-five years ago it was stillactually burning, issuing from the earth in a little undying flame, andit was called “Te Ahi a Uenuku.” (A seam of lignite is said to havebeen found burning in the locality by the early settlers and explorers,and this[57] the Maorisidentified with the Hawaikian sorcerer’s magic blaze.)

But it seems that Tamatea’s fire so carefullytended by the gods went out as he travelled slowlyup the hills from Otago, and none had been kindledagain when he reached the Port Hills. And as he andhis companions came out of the bush and passed outon to the summit of the mountain above Rapaki, agreat storm of wind and rain, followed by hail andsnow, burst upon them from the south and they werelike to perish from the cold. It was freezing cold,and Tamatea was without fire or the means of makingone, for no fire-making timbers grew in that spot.In his extremity he stood upon the tall crag-topyonder—the one that now is called “The Breast ofTamatea”—and called aloud and karakia’d and madeincantations for sacred fire to be sent from the NorthIsland, the land of active volcanoes, to save the livesof himself and his companions. He called to his elderrelative, Ngatoro-i-Rangi, and to the guardians of theAhi-Tipua, the volcanic fires.

And the chief’s fervent prayer was answered in amoment. The fire, sent by the gods in the heart ofthe North Island, burst forth from Tongariro andspeeding down the rift of the Wanganui River valleyit touched a spot near Nelson, and again it touchedMotu-nau—the small island close to the CanterburyCoast—and then it appeared again in a magic blazeon the side of Witch Hill, and the Maori explorerswarmed their frozen limbs and were saved. The firedid not stop here in its wonderful flight, for it wenton across the harbour, and the white chute of rock,like a huge sheep-dip trough, shining yonder above thebay of Waiaki is the last of the sacred flames ofTamatea.

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And when the chief left the spot next day to continuehis journey he said, “Let this place be calledThe Place where Tamatea’s Fire-Ashes Lie”; and soto-day the rocky wall which the white man has namedthe Giant’s Causeway is to the Maori “Te Whaka-takanga-o-te-Karehu-a-Tamatea.” And the volcanicfire itself is “Te Ahi-a-Tamatea.”

Such is the story of Tamatea’s Fire as told by HoneTaare Tikao, in reciting the legends learned from thelong-dead elders of his tribe. A legend embalming adistinct perception of the geological history of thesehills. The Kaumatua truly says that the magical wallsof Tamatea’s Fire Ashes are of later origin than thevolcanic crags and hills which lie about them, andacross which they cut. The Wanganui River, downwhich the sacred fire came from the crater ofNgauruhoe, was then dry; it was a rift opened for itby the Volcano Gods. Tikao speaks of a time whenthe lower part of Lyttelton Harbour was not ineruption, but when the upper part was; from thesouthern side of Quail Island to the head of the baywas a furnace; there was no water in it at thatimmeasurably distant day. There are lava rocks, hesays, like those of the Ahi-a-Tamatea on the shore ofQuail Island; and then there are the always wonderfulcliff of Pari-mataa and the wall of Otarahaka on theMount Herbert side of the upper harbour.

Of the lava dykes Professor R. Speight writes inhis account of the geology of the Port Hills that theyradiate from the harbour as a centre and form, as itwere, the ribs of the mountain, holding it firmlytogether and helping it to resist the enormous strainsto which it was exposed before and during eruptions.“Judging from the persistent nature of these dykes,”he adds, “it is clear that the mountain must havebeen split at times from top to bottom, and the liquidmaterial which welled from the fissures must havelooked at night like a red-hot streak across thecountry.”

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And so, by way of the long Maori story, the onesolitary example of volcano-legendry the writer hasheard from the South Island, we come to the Rapakipeak’s guardian name, Te Poho-o-Tamatea. Theexplorer bestowed his name upon the height, tapa-ing it after himself and his sacred breast, much as apresent-day traveller justly might claim the right tomap-name some peak after himself. Tamatea’s travelsled him far after he turned his back on the PortHills. He marched up on the coast to Kaikoura, andthere or further north he built a canoe, or, what ismore probable, borrowed or forcibly appropriated onebelonging to the tangata whenua who must alreadyhave been living in the Marlborough country, andcrossed to the North Island. He canoed up the WanganuiRiver—there is a curious rock, the end of whichthe natives used to paint red with kokowai ochre, projectingfrom the eastern bank many miles above Pipi-riki,still known as Tamatea’s Rock—and crossed thecentral plateau to Lake Taupo, and thence went on tothe East Coast. There are innumerable stories illustratinghis genius for exploration, and from end toend of New Zealand place nomenclature memorises histravels and justifies the name by which he is known inhistory, Tamatea-pokai-whenua, or “Tamatea-who-travels-through-the-land.”He was a true type of the pioneer and the path-finder,the Fremont of Aotea-roa and the Wai-pounamu, the manwho heard the “one everlasting Whisper”—

Something hidden. Go and find it. Go and look behind the Ranges—
Something lost behind the Ranges. Lost and waiting for you. Go!

HILLS OF FAERY.

THE LITTLE PEOPLE OF THE MIST.

Our talk turned one day to the poetic legendary pastof the Port Hills above us and the Banks Peninsulapeaks yonder, hemming in Lyttelton Harbour in anannular line of dead fire crags. They were the hillsof an artist’s dream this golden afternoon, all theirasperities of crag and bare bluff softened and gildedby the mellow light of a calm, bright, windless day.There was just the faintest of hazy films drawing overthe nearer hills from the waters. The sea below us atRapaki lay in unbreathing quiet, as soft, as bright andblue as Kipling’s Indian Ocean. The rich purple ofdistance painted the most remote of the Peninsulapeaks, and here and there a wispy tail of mist floatedabout the head of a gully that cleft the crumpled hillsswelling up into the rocky summits of the Pohue andthe Ahu-patiki. Just where the land went steeply upfrom the head of the bay to the shoulders of TeAhu-Patiki, otherwise Mount Herbert, we could seethe curious light grey rock wall of the Tarahaka,above the Pari-mataa, “Obsidian Cliff,” like a greatchute down the mountain side, gleaming in thesun, the tipua rockof the fire gods. Nearer, in the middle ofthe picture, were the black volcanic cliffs, andthe green slopes and pine-groves of the Lepers’ Isle,the island which the Maoris of old called Otamahua, mapped by the pakehaas Quail Island; it was one tragic spot in the picture,a place of living death.

The Kaumatua spoke of the hilltop homes of thePatu-paiarehe , the fairies, whose craggy castles[62]defended by the thick dark woods and the fogs andmists, ringed all this harbour round and made thehigh places of the Peninsula an uncanny land, givenup to all manner of enchantments. Not that hereposed implicit faith in the fairy stories himself, hetold them as he had heard them from his elders inthe days of long ago. “We are half pakeha ourselvesnow, we Ngai-Tahu,” he said, “and our youngpeople deride these notions about the Patu-paiarehe .Yet—these hills were different in my young days,when the mists came down and the fog enveloped thelittle streams tumbling down all the valleys fromthe gloomy places. We went birding into the forest,and we made clearings for cultivations and cut firewoodin the bush for sale to the pakeha. Sometimes,when the mists came down and the fog enveloped thehills, on still, calm days our old men and women wouldsay the fairies were out, the sun-shunning Patu-paiarehe ,and it were well not to venture up therange. On brooding quiet days our people could hearthe thin voices of the little folk—they were small, fairpeople, as all the elders said—crying out to each otherand singing fairy songs and playing little songs ontheir wooden or bone flutes, their koauau and putorino .This Poho-o-Tamatea, the high peak behind the kainga of Rapaki, was one of their homes, their pas , butthere were others, the high places of the fairies, allaround these hills, from my peak above there rightaway along the peak-tops touched by the SummitRoad, right round to Cooper’s Knobs and then on tothe Peninsula, even to Otoki, the haunted mountainwhich the pakeha calls Brazenose, on the southern sideof Akaroa town.”

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The Kaumatua swept his finger across the southernsky-line, the wild and broken peaks of BanksPeninsula, rising up in powerful slants from the soft[64]blue of the harbour, creased with the gullies of water-courses.“Over yonder,” he said, “are the chief pas of the Patu-paiarehe , which I shall list for you: Thereis the rock of Te Pohue, which pakehas call the Monumentbetween Purau and Port Levy; there is HukuikaPeak, on the hill road between Pigeon Bay and LittleRiver; there is the mountain-top of Te U-Kura,which commands all the hill-country of thePeninsula—it is just at the back of thestopping-place called Hilltop on the road fromLittle River to Akaroa town. Also there are thehigh rocky peaks which overlook Akaroa Harbour—Pu-Waitaha,or French Hill, between Wainui settlementand Buchanan’s; Otehore, a rocky flat-toppedheight above French Farm, on the upper part of theharbour; the summit heights above Akaroa town,Purple Peak, Mount Berard and Brazenose—these wecall O-te-Patatu, Tara-te-rehu, and Otoki; and lastlyTuhiraki, the sky-pencilling peak, which the Frenchnamed Mount Bossu, on the western side of the harbour.All these were the mountain pas of the fairies.

“Now, amongst the fairy pas ,” the word-of-mouthhistorian went on, “there are two places ofparticular enchantment. One is that lofty palisadeof a peak which you call Brazenose, and the level-toppedhill above French Farm. Otoki—the Place ofthe Axe—is the name for Brazenose, but there is anancient burying-ground there, upon the mistymountain immediately above the little Maorivillage of Onuku, on the beach side, which iscalled Otehore; the Wahi-tapu , or cemetery,makes it doubly sacred. This place and theheight above French Farm were both calledOtehore, and the people of the mists loved them well.On the small piece of level ground on that Otehorewhich stands above French Farm the fairy hapu of[65]those parts had their pa , and there they would gatherat night for their fairy meetings, and gather by dayalso in the foggy weather when no Maori eye couldsee them; and then would be heard their sweet fairysongs, their waiatas , and the tunes they played upontheir flutes, sounding faintly from the cloudy mountain.”

Indeed, on dim and foggy days, and when the wetvapours becloud the long-dead volcano land, it is notdifficult to enter into the spirit of the Maori fancy,and in imagination people all these craggy pinnacleswith the Patu-paiarehe , and the wooded gulches withMaeroero , the wild men of the bush. When the mistssteal down on the rhyolite knobs of the fire-fused PortHills and the Peninsula, craggy beyond description,peaked in a hundred fantastic shapes, with great blackand grey nipples of lava protruding from the grassyslopes and the woody ridges, the land has an eerielook, fit playground for the Forgetful People, as theold Irish would have called them. In the early morningtoo, when the fogs are lifting from the bays, and hereand there a black broken thumb of a peak juts outabove the trailing vapours, or the mist-wreaths drapein torn veilings the huge rampart-like scarps, andwhen the first rosy sunbeams glorify the half-revealedmountains, the poetic mind can well conceive of thisregion as one of fairy wizardry and all manner ofdusk-time magic. One day when it rained and blew,we were motoring over the hills from the Plains toAkaroa, scarcely able to see twenty yards infront of the car when we ran cautiously round toHilltop. Suddenly the dense masses of fog were rentaside by the wind, and right above us, with a fore-groundof blackened tree-stumps, remnant of theruined forest, we caught a glimpse of the black, jaggedtor which the Maori called Te Puha, thrust up like a[66]great spearhead by Ruaimoko, the Fire-God; in thelight of the Kaumatua’s stories it was easy to imagineit a sentry-tower of the fairies, or of such a place ofwitchery as the Ben Bulben of which we read inW. B. Yeats’s “Celtic Twilight.”

There is another rugged, dark volcanic crag, woodedabout its base, crowning one of these Peninsula ridges,of which the Old Man of Rapaki has a poetic story.This is the pinnacle above and to the north of theHilltop Hotel, on the divide where the traveller getshis first sight of Akaroa lying more than a thousandfeet below. The Kaumatua gave it as one of his fairypeaks, its Native name is Te U-Kura, and as far as Ihave been able to ascertain, it bears no official pakeha name. Te U-Kura, he says, is an exceedingly ancientdesignation; it was a name given by the fairies. Itmeans “The Resting Place of the Ruddy Light.” Inhis younger days, when he lived at Tikao Bay, on theshores of Akaroa harbour, he frequently observed forhimself the peculiar fitness of the Hilltop name. Oftenat sunset a cloud-cap would rest lightly on the darkskull of the fairy crag, and to this cloud the decliningsun would impart a bright red glow, the kura of theMaori. This was a sign to the weather-wise that anor’-wester was blowing on the Canterbury Plains—atohu , or token, that was seldom astray. “U” meansto rest, as a canoe upon the beach. This surely is aname that the pakeha should imprint upon his Peninsulamaps. It lends itself to more than one euphoniousvariant in the pakeha -tongue, as “Red Cloud’sRest,” or “Place of the Sunset’s Glow.”

Behind the town of Akaroa, the grassy hills, lightlywooded here and there like a beautiful wild park,culminate in a craggy skyline, more than a thousandfeet above the fields and orchards on the town outskirts.Dark tors of rhyolite, grassed to the base of

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co*ckayne’s Cairn Cass Peak

[68]

their nippled upswells, dreamy on sunny days in theirdelicate wash of hazy blue. Here near the Stony Bayroad saddle, is the legend-haunted O-te-Patatu, theold-time ridge of the fairies and the

titi

. The

titi

ormuttonbird has long since disappeared from thePort and Peninsula hills, but in the Maori days itwas plentiful on many such high places. It loved tobuild on lofty hills, where the soil was soft enough toenable it to make its burrows. There was a cliff atO-te-Patatu, says the

Kaumatua

, where the

titi

livedand bred in great numbers in the long ago. TheMaori tribes who lived on the beaches and on thetrenched and parapeted promontories made expeditionsto the hilltop in the season when the young birdswere fat, and caught, cooked and preserved them inkelp baskets and pottles, just as the Foveaux Straitand Stewart Island Maoris do at the present time. Butthe

Patu-paiarche

who lived on the crags of O-te-Patatuand Tara-te-rehu also hunted these

titi

, andslaughtered them in such numbers, in a most unfairylikemanner, that presently these fishy petrels becameextinct in that locality. A woman of the Ngai-Tahu,or Ngati-Mamoe, at Akaroa, who was said to be inlove with a fairy, but who no doubt also loved thepalatable muttonbird, chanted this little

waiata

, asong of fairy times which is still to be heard atRapaki and other Native villages:—

(Translation)

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The soft and plaintive flute song of the fair-skinnedfolk who lived on these misty mountains seems to haveappealed to the Native heart, for it is described assweeter by far than the whakatangitangi , the “makingsound upon sound,” of the ordinary Maori flute-players.Distance, aided by imagination, no doubt lentit additional enchantment. And the Patu-paiarehe men appear often to have made themselves agreeableto the wahine Maori, for stories are told of womenbeing taken as wives by the fairy chiefs, and of girlsfrom the Maori villages wandering away into thewoods to meet their fairy lovers. The offspring ofsuch unions were always known by their extremelyfair skins, unnaturally pale, and their light flaxenhair; they were korako or albinos.

And there was another people of the wilds. Sometimeson dark nights the Maori villagers would seethe light of torches moving about in bays acrossLyttelton Harbour, then the Bay of Raupo, where theyknew there was no settlement of their tribe, and theywould say to each other, “See! The Maeroero are out,spearing patiki.” The Maeroero were the wild menof the woods, fierce hairy giants who sometimes capturedMaori women and carried them off to be theirwives in the bush of the Port Hills. The Maeroero aredescribed as having very long and sharp finger-nails,so long that they were great claws, and it was withthese long talons that they speared the flatfish andcaught the birds in the forests.

To the matter-of-fact pakeha and the modernisedMaori there is a very simple explanation of these fairytales. The Patu-paiarehe and the Maero were simply[70]the remnants of aboriginal tribes, such as the Ngati-Mamoeor the Waitaha or their predecessors, drivenaway into the heart of the mountains and the forests,where they lived a wild, secluded life, existing on thefoods of the wilderness. The old English andScottish belief in fairy people arose in much the same[71]way, the very word “pixy” comes from the name ofthe Picts, who were driven into the hills and caves.Nevertheless, for those who like to preserve theirPeter Pan fancies and illusions this theory may cheerfullybe disregarded, and we may still, on days ofmist and cloudy calm, imagine the little tribes of therocks flitting out from their caves and hollow treesand raising as of old their thin voices in their waiatas and piping their fairy sweet koauau music on thelevel hilltop of Otehore or the dark rock of Tamatea’sBreast.

MOUNT PLEASANT AND ITS “TAPU.”

Now the Old Man’s memories take him back seawardsacross the Port Hills to the familiar knolls ofTauhinu-Korokio. This is the Native name of MountPleasant, the great grassy upswell of land liftingsixteen hundred feet above sea-level and looking downserenely on the vast curving sand-line of PegasusBay. The Maori name is a combination of the namesof two Native shrubs which were very plentiful onthat portion of the hills in former times and specimensof which may still be seen there. Tauhinu is aheath-like plant found all over New Zealand; it is thePomaderis phylicaefolia of the botanists. It grows twoor three feet high, or sometimes higher, and it is soplentiful and so prone to spread that it has beenplaced on the Agricultural Department’s index expurgatoriousas a noxious weed, in spite of all the sweetheathery perfume of its blossoms which the bees love.The korokio is a small bushy black-branched growthwhich the tauhinu , as the Maoris say, often embracesand smothers, as the rata eventually smothers thetree which it clasps. Tauhinu-korokio was an ancientpa of Ngati-Mamoe which stood on the site of MajorHornbrook’s old homestead and the present house of[72]

stay for visitors, just below a remnant of the ancientbush on the northern and sunny slope of the greenmountain. There was a good spring of water closeby, and this important fact no doubt determined thesituation of the Ngati-Mamoe hillmen’s village. InNgai-Tahu times, after Te Rangi-Whakaputa hadconquered this pa in the course of his subjugation ofthe Whaka-Raupo aborigines, the vicinity was foundby the Ngai-Tahu to be a very suitable spot for suchvegetable foods as the korau and the pora , or pohata,now extinct; the roots, which were sweet, were dried inthe sun and stored in ruas , or underground pits andearthed-in storehouses, as potatoes and kumara arenow. Kumara and taro , the tropic foods of the north,[73]did not flourish in the hill country of the south,though they did well enough, with care, on favouredparts of the Canterbury Plains and the Coast.

There is in Maori belief an exceedingly tapu spoton Tauhinu-korokio, close to where the old Ngati-Mamoepa stood. It was probably either a tuahu or aburying-place; the tuahu was the spot where the tribalgods, or, rather, their symbols in wood and stone,were kept, and where the wise men, the tohungas,resorted for incantation and occult ceremonies and theblack art of the makutu, by which enemies might beslain though they were at a great distance, bythought transmission and the malignant projection ofthe will. It is not well to camp there even now,should you have Maori blood in your veins. Theflax-clumps and the tauhinu bushes still murmur thename of Ngati-Mamoe, and though pakeha sheep havelong grazed over the site of Tauhinu-korokio andpakeha voices make lively the mountain side, the soilholds the mysterious spell of the tapu. Maoris whohave camped on the side of the track which goes overthe hills there have spent a night of inexplicable discomfort,inexplicable, that is, but for the presence ofthe tapu and the unseen spirits of Maoridom.Taare Tikao himself says that many years ago, whenhe was shearing at Major Hornbrook’s, he wastaken suddenly and mysteriously ill, and that theillness was probably the effect of the local tapu.However, these fancies need not trouble thepakeha, whose constitution is not affected by even themost virulent of Maori bedevilments.

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