William Reginald Hodder

“ For several hours I lay beneath my fern shield hearing nothing more unusual than the singing of many birds in the valley, the frothing of the water among the rocks at the end of the pool, and its gentle lapping against the granite wall, a yard on my right. There could be no one in the valley, for if the fierce Ngaraki had been there he would have been up and abroad long since; there was no sound, no sign of any human being. What if, after all, Ngaraki dwelt within the mountain? By what strange and hidden gateway did he pass in and out of his temple? ”

“ Grey went first in his wake, Crystal followed, and I came last. When we had gained the level rock above, by means of the rough, but not difficult, niches in the wall, the torchlight shed a fitful glare upon the nearer rim of the great basin, and upon part of the lake. The water, flung up tumultuously in the centre, boiled and effervesced and lapped against the rocky rim on which we stood. Far away at the end of the narrowing gulf could be seen the giants’ window, through which the sunlight streamed like silver, but grew golden as it fell obliquely into the denser darkness of the abyss. ”

“ I passed my hand quickly across my brow and said to my senses, “Fools! it is merely a girl of to-day draped in the style of the queen of ancient night to cheat a Maori chief.” But these words did not multiply, for I saw at a glance that Crystal’s lovely face was full of those wistful dreams of long ago which had come to me. Her form was burdened as if with a sweet, but heavy sadness, and her head drooped, so that her long, black, rippling masses of hair enveloped her arms and shoulders like a shroud of darkness, in the depths of which was the veiled light of her eyes. ”

“ As I stood shuddering helplessly, his mood changed, and he began to pace fiercely up and down the cave, passing and re-passing through the broad flood of twilight that came through the opening, and fell upon the face of the marble image.
“Ngha! she has withdrawn into the sky,” he said. “I will go to her, and she shall not return when I am one. It is but a stone that is here. It shall not remain. The world shall see the Bright One no more. It is the end; it is the end.”
He disappeared in the darkness of the inner cave, and came out again with a weapon, a heavy meré of the broad-leaf kind. ”

“ I heard a slight movement in the darkness among the Maori gods, and was about to ask who was there, when Miriam clutched my arm and pointed towards the head of the marble stairs which led up into the cave. There, framed in the rugged archway, stood the tall figure of Ngaraki the Terrible, clad in his flowing robe—a magnificent Maori, whose flashing eye was hard to meet, whose proud, fierce, but noble bearing marked him out as a ruler of men. His eyes were fixed upon the white figure in the centre of the cave, standing where Hinauri had for ever stood. ”

“ It was a great day for Ngaraki. It was not a day for beating his meré on the ground, but for plucking the very eyes and boiling the very heads of the gaunt images which were his hated foes. And now in a supreme moment he stood on the brink of Porawa with his arch enemy’s head in his hand. He looked into the awful depths, and would have chanted his crowning triumph. But words would not come. How could he chant on such a theme without striding up and down? All he could do was to express his utmost and fiercest contempt for the head of the Degrader of Women and all his brood. ”

“ Then those three colossal fragments—the two parts of the broken spar and the great round stone—fell down, down into the darkness, while the white figure beyond the abyss bent over the brink and listened. A dull, crashing sound of thunder came up from the depths and reverberated through the whole gloomy place, echoing from the stupendous crags overhead and rolling away into the vast reaches of the cavern. The false image of the woman, with the heavy stone which oppressed it, had at last been hurled down, and now lay among the ruins of old-world things on the granite floor of the earth. ”

“ We, the Brotherhood of Huo, laugh in scorn at the windy words of Zun. He sees a phantom up there in the darkness. Hia is swallowed up in Huo, whose body we have bound down to the rock for ever. Her spirit we have bound also to the moon-face, that we may see to work our will. By her bondage we shall live, but the life of Hia’s people shall be short and their death long. They shall die and become like soil, and those they leave behind them shall weep and wail and lament. ”

“ Then Hinauri spoke, and her words seemed to gather to themselves all the loving prayers that have risen from the lips of women since the human world began. The thrilling music of her voice struck some invisible but responsive harp-strings in the air of the silent cave, and the song of it went singing on and on, coalescing with the sweet tones that underlie the universe of women’s hearts—on and on until the Great Tohungas of the Earth quieted the music of their deeds to hear the strain, and, listening, to whisper: “Hush! we toil in vain. A woman prays and all is done. ”

“ Something of the triumphant feelings of Ngaraki, when he had hurled the Vile Tohunga’s head down to Porawa, came over me as I listened, fancying that I should hear that wild laugh again echoing from the depths of Darkness. But there was no reply; the Poisoner had gone down for ever.
I was aroused by the wash of the water rising on the rocks where I stood. Even as I sprang forward and caught up another blazing fragment, the tide surged in and swamped the fire with a quick hiss. I darted into the tunnel with the waves lapping at my heels, and followed Kahikatea. ”

“ I struck a match, and she lighted a torch that stood upright in a crevice in a ledge of rock. By the glow of the clear-burning pineheart I glanced quickly round the place. The jagged stone walls were not of marble, but of fine granite, and the furthest ray of the torch revealed no closing in of the rocks overhead. Dim reaches and shadows I could see, but no roof—indeed, by the freshness and purity of the air alone it was evident that there was an outlet above. That was surely the way by which Kahikatea had first entered the cave. ”

“ As she hastened before me among the trees of the garden, and, later, when she stood and waited for me on the verandah steps, looking down between the clustering vines, I thought that any man, no matter how poetical, was a fool to fall in love with the beauty depicted on a stone, when the world of living things contained such loveliness in the flesh. Truly it was as Kahikatea had said: the woman who had conceived the image of Hinauri and reproduced it upon the stone could not have borne an unlovely child. Yet to say that Crystal Grey was “not unlovely” would be a very inadequate description. ”

“ A woman’s shriek! a moan! and another shriek! coming from the chamber towards which I was hastening.
As I staggered forward I saw Kahikatea supporting the form of Hinauri drooping on his arm. Her face was as white as the stone image I had left in the marble cave. Yet another yell and another crash echoed faintly down the tunnels, and a tremor ran through the fair form, as Kahikatea sank upon a rock and supported her head upon his knee.
“She is dying, Warnock,” he said, in a voice of anguish, gazing down into her lovely face, while I held the torch so that the light fell upon it. ”

“ It is true it now strikes into the cave at certain times of the year through a crevice in some outstanding crags, but, O children of a later sun, it is a ray of the same light that shone there ages since, and bore Hinauri’s spirit away. E tama! there is a prophecy that one day, when this ray of Ihi Ihi is upon the sacred stone, her ancient spirit will return upon it, and she will live. Already is the stone that bound her broken away; already she stands free, as she stood long, long ago, with her arms outstretched to the future, and the dawn of a new age upon her radiant face. ”

“ The Great Tohungas of the Earth have taught me in my sleep with words like the voice of the wind in the forest trees: ‘O Tohunga of the Great Rock, the mystery of Hinauri is not for the Maori unless thou tell it first to the Sons of the Sea, but know, if thou tell it, thou must die.’ Therefore, Son, I show it to you, for, what though I fear the eye of the fierce Ngaraki, I fear not death. ”

“ For a time they remained facing each other, the girl of to-day and the goddess of ancient night, for whom the giants of old had fought their grim battles—the pure woman whom the vile Cazotl had sought to degrade by his magic, and Hinauri who, from the time of Zun the Terrible, had been fiercely guarded from the Vile Ones of all time by a greater magic—Crystal Grey, who loved my perfect man, and the cold white being, which, set in the high solitudes of the world, my perfect man had loved. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The men who had bound that great spar down with that huge round stone—what else could have done it?—the men who had made the secret way by which Ngaraki had disappeared beneath the lake, who had carved the pathway out of the side of the abyss and fashioned this stupendous window—the men of old who had done all this still haunted that profound darkness down there, in which, perhaps, there were mysteries of a stranger kind. ”

“ Friend! my dreams have ended sadly, but the strange madness that drew me to this solitude was, I know now, full of hidden method. You heard what she said: ‘Hasten on the world.’ Warnock! if ever a man tried, by putting his shoulder to the wheel of time, to hasten the dawn of a brighter age, I am going to try. She told me many things that you did not hear and that I cannot tell you—things throwing light on the world’s failure in the past to grasp its opportunities—plans to pave the way for an inborn greatness of a coming generation. ”

“ There is another ointment, O Kahikatea, which will cause a man to forget only the events of a single moon, or at least to recall them dimly as dreams. But it was necessary that the pakeha should forget everything, and he went forth from the mountain as one in a trance, from which at sunset he would awake in his right mind, but as a man who can speak the words that he always spoke, and do the things which he always did, yet can remember neither his own name nor the face of his friend. This, O men of to-day, is a word of the ancient magic for which our lower tohungas seek in vain. ”

“ It was one of those clear, bright mornings which, on a shelving shore between the glistening bush and the sparkling sea, are only to be interpreted by the liquid song of the korimako, sipping dew and honey as he sings in the flowering trees, or by the merry fantail’s laugh, as with tail outspread she chases the gnat, which twists and turns in the sunlight.
“Tiki,” I said presently, “you go on ahead and tell Te Makawawa we are coming. We can find the way all right.” ”

“ Hinauri is no more.
“She will never come again. No distant dawn will bear her feet, no sun ray bring her back to life.
“Alas! Alas! the wild white crane against the cloud a moment shows her shining wing, then all is dark and all is lost.”
He paused for a moment on the brink of the abyss—a torchlight picture framed in the gloom of his ancient temple. For a moment his eyes were raised as if his glance could pierce through the darkness and beyond the cavern’s roof; then his voice rang out again in fiercer tones:
“She stays not! neither will I stay! I’ll fling me to the dark! Ngha! ”

“ Standing under cover of the darkness, but haunted by these ghostly footsteps, I saw, twenty yards on my right, a dim glow. As soon as this caught my eye I knew what was going to happen. Somebody was blowing a piece of smouldering dry punk into a blaze; a torch, or several torches, would be lighted, and I would be hunted out like a rat. I was determined that this should not be if I could possibly help it. I much preferred the dark and the ghostly footsteps. Now the punk was glowing red, and, just above it, the wizened face of someone blowing it appeared distinctly. ”

“ When he wakes from a deep swoon he is willing to admit that he may be anywhere. But imagine the feelings of a man, whose last recollection was that of being swept over the brink of an abyss, waking up and finding himself lying on his back on a mossy bank, with a well-known face bending over him.
Such was my case, and I thought the whole thing was so impossible that I gave it up, and, closing my eyes, continued my downward career through the blackness of darkness, wondering when the final crash would come. ”