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? ”

“ As a soul plunges down into the world of spirits from the heights of gloomy Reinga, so he hurled himself headlong into the abyss, lighting the way to death with his blazing torch. The sight of it wrung a cry from me. I slid down the rope and made my way to the brink of the abyss, where I leaned forward, gazing into the darkness. Far down a light burns still and clear—a night-lamp by a hero’s bedside. For a moment I think I see its ray light up the image of Zun the Terrible, for ever gazing upwards through the night. The love that does not die is stamped upon the granite face. ”

“ I thought of Cazotl and his wizard minion with a creep of horror. Then, by association of ideas, my thoughts ran down to the Vile Tohungas in the abyss. As the rising moon threw his light up into the sky above the mountain wall I stood a second time, in imagination, on those giant steps in the Pit, and watched the head of the tallest image hewn out again from the dark by the descending ray of the moon flooding down through the giants’ window. How like the vile granite face was that of the fiend of Crystal’s pictured dream! ”

“ 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 she has withdrawn into the sky,” he said.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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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! ”

“ 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.” ”

“ Matter of fact as I was, I could not but see that if ever there was a meaning in a dream there was a meaning in this. The Destroyers of Woman exulting at the slow undermining of mankind in the mass, their threat hurled at Woman as the Mother of a nobler and more godlike race, their resolve to degrade her as such, so that this world should be peopled with dull, coarse forms, informed by vile minds, such as their own evil faces portrayed—all this, I reflected with astonishment, was indeed the tale of Ngaraki the savage, retold from the heart of an innocent girl. ”

“ Miriam Grey caught her breath and stepped back, the limit of human wonder upon her gentle face. The Maori chief stood erect, his eyes shining like stars, but his countenance motionless with a control that seemed more than human. Grey moved a sudden step forward, and, as I turned my head, I saw in the shadows beyond him the vague outline of a giant figure I knew. It was Kahikatea, standing with one hand on the buttress, his head bent forward to view the form of Hinauri in the sun ray. ”

“ I am certain it can’t be; I should have felt it. Dear husband! take me in your arms again and call me wife. No one has ever come between us.”
“And no one ever shall,” he replied.
In the silence that followed I withdrew, and when the manifold sound of agony and wailing, coming out of the far darkness of the interior, again fell upon my ears, I felt toned up to endure it. But another voice, rising up out of the abyss, high and jubilant, told me that Ngaraki was there holding his grim triumph. I picked up my torch and made my way down. ”

“ Ihi-Ihi has come from the west. Hinauri has burst from her ancient tomb. By the magic of a woman has she burst her bonds. And now the long-sealed fountains of the Maori’s breast leap and dance and sparkle in the sun with music sweeter than the korimako’s joy. Ngha! I will hasten to my people: my heart is breaking with a mighty song.”
He hurried away, and his stately form was soon lost in the shadows below the stairway.
Then Hinauri, the daughter of Miriam Grey, turned to her mother with a strange blending of emotions upon her face. ”

“ THE DAUGHTER OF THE DAWN. Towards sunset I stood at the opening of the cave and looked down upon the rolling plain below, with the Lion Rock enclosing the little valley against the mountain wall. About the banks of the stream the afternoon sun, obscured from me by some crags that stood out upon my left, slumbered upon beds of moss, and all was hushed. Thistle-down floated along the slow currents of the air; gnats and bright-coloured beetles winged their way above the tops of the dreamy trees, while here and there a tui flashed out from the foliage to chase them in the sunlight. ”

“ Motioning Ngaraki to stand aside and be silent, she drew near and placed the talisman with its sparkling gems upon the head of the living image. As she did so the pallor and abstraction, the weariness and sadness, fell from the face and form of Crystal. She no longer drooped. The warm blood mounted to her cheeks and sparkled in her eyes. Power and stateliness came into her pose. She awoke. And at that instant the expected sun ray burst in, and the dazzling beauty of the Daughter of the Dawn was revealed.
In all my dreamings I had never dreamt of beauty as divine as that. ”

“ I cannot imagine anyone more perfect than Crystal Grey. Come back and let us all go together. The ‘way of the fish’ is easier than the ‘way of the spider.’ My dear Kahikatea, long solitude has made dreams and visions too real to you.”
“I know it, Warnock, I know it,” he said fiercely. “I am as mad as a mystic in this one thing—and yet there’s a meaning in it—a grand meaning!”
He paused in a contemplative way, then, recalling himself, continued, “No; there is no woman of flesh and blood for me—only Hinauri, the Daughter of the Dawn, and she is not flesh and blood—at least, not yet.” ”

“ None could imitate so faithfully the pose of longing and expectancy which had been so startling in the marble. No; as I gazed with all my soul, wonder forced the settled conviction into my mind that it was in reality Hinauri, the Daughter of the Dawn, waking from her age-long trance. Reclothed in flesh, it was the ancient spirit of the pure one who, in a far-off period of the world’s unwritten history, had come down from the skies to rule the people by the Law of Love. ”