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Fairy Folk Tales of the Maori

The Place where the Sky was Dark

The Place where the Sky was Dark

As Ngatoro stood there near the lofty peak of Ngauruhoe, viewing the wonderful new land spread all about him, he beheld with the god-aided vision of the seer and page 18 the magician a strange chief and his party of warriors and slaves approaching from the East. It was Hape-from-beyond-the-Sky, seeking land for himself and his tribe. Ngatoro boiled with godlike anger; he was the first discoverer of this enchanted country, the belly of the fish of Maui, and he would brook no others in his newly-gotten territory. Hape's company was undesirable; no neighbours were welcome in the land of Taupo. So Ngatoro betook him to his incantations; and he called in a great roaring voice—the voice of a god—saying in tones of thunder: “Get you gone, O stranger! This country is for me, for Ngatoro! Depart whence you came!” But Hape, heeding not those menacing words, heard like the roll of an approaching thunderstorm, came marching on across the tussock plains.

Ngatoro recited his heaven-compelling incantations; he called upon the gods of the sky and the gods of the under-world, and chiefly upon Ruaimoko, the dread demon of volcanoes. And strange and terrible things befell.

The sky suddenly became dark as night, and out burst a huge sheet of flame from page 19 Ngauruhoe's fiery pit, and the smoke and ashes from the volcano were borne over the land to the east by a mighty rushing wind. And then, upon this scene of gloom and terror, a vast black cloud swept down over the newcomers' heads and fell a life-destroying storm of sleet and snow. The frozen death of the huka descended upon Hape and his party, and they perished there upon those dreadful plains. They perished everyone. “Kaitoa! It served them right,” said Wairehu, “for persisting in their march when they saw that my ancestor Ngatoro was already in possession of the country!” And from that day to this the desert where Hape perished has been known as Te Rangi Po—the Place Where the Sky is Dark.

Certainly it is well enough named, that tract of true desert, admitted the pakeha listeners. The Rangi-Po is a sterile, bare, forbidding place wherein for broad spaces even the hardy tussock declines to grow. A bleak, shivery gale-swept plain, to be passed as quickly as possible. It looks a blasted heath, lying even to this day under the curse of the gods.

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page 20

Of Pihanga, too, we hear, yon softly-rounded mountain of green forest, above Roto-a-Ira lake, and of her beauty of form which captivated the mountain-gods of old. For mountains were strangely like human beings in those wonderful dim days when all the world was in faerie land; they loved and they fought like mortals. It was over fair Pihanga that Tongariro and Taranaki quarrelled, and titanic indeed was the battle of the volcanoes, ending in the expulsion of Taranaki from his mighty seat on the plains between Tongariro and snowy Ruapehu, and his flight to the far west coast of the island. So to-day Lady Pihanga—so obviously of the female sex, says the Maori, for look you, her shape!—sits complacently there accepting the love of her volcanic husband, in the long streamers of cloud and sulphurous vapours that are borne to her on the wings of the strong south wind. It is the mihi of the mountains, the loving greetings in upper air. And when, sometimes for days at a time, the summits of the ranges are veiled in mist and fog, the Maoris of Otukou and Papakai say: “Behold, our ancestors, our father and page 21 mother are greeting each other in the clouds of heaven. Their ancient love revives, they embrace one another as in the days of old.”