Sacred Taupiri Mountain.

It [the Sacred Taupiri Mountain] is a maunga-hikonga-uira, a lightning peak of omen. If lightning were seen flashing downward immediately above the mountain, the spectacle was taken to portend the death of some notable man or woman of the tribe, or some other impending misfortune. Another peak of lightning omen is Pirongia Mountain. Thunder-storms and earth-quakes were phenomena of dread portent, and the rolling of thunder along the ranges and the quivering of the earth were supposed to accompany the deaths of high chiefs. This belief was embodied in a grand dirge we heard here at Taupiri in 1894, when three thouand Maoris gathered for the great tangihanga, or funeral ceremonies, over King Tawhiao, the son of Potatau, the first Maori King. This was the last of the great ceremonies of this kind carried out with all the ancient forms and observations. I made this translation of the death-song chanted by a thousand voices as the King's body was borne to the marae, or meeting-place, to the accompaniment of a great war-dance and volleys of rifle-fire and the explosion of dynamite charges like minute-guns on the summit of the burial-hill:—

I hear the thunder crashing,
Rumbling o'er me in the sky,
Heaven's sign for the mighty dead;
The Taniwha leaps forth from his cave.
Alas! Alas! Alas! My grief!
From Mokau unto Tamaki
The earthquake shakes the land;
The moon has disappeared;
The stars fall from the sky.
‘Tis Waikato arising from the deep.
Alas! Alas! Alas! My woe!

The thrilling refrain of each verse, “Aué, aué, aué! Te mamae i au!” was chanted with a heart-piercing intensity of feeling, and the great chorus rang far across the river.

“Taniwha (literally water-monster or dragon) in this chant means a high chief; “Waikato-taniwha-rau,” or “Waikato of a hundred dragons,” a favourite proverbial expression for the river and the tribe, refers to the many powerful warrior chiefs of the clan.

Recollections of those classic ceremonials on the old camping-ground between Taupiri Station and the river bring up poetic memories, too, of this sacred plain of Tangirau, the Place of Many Wailings, at the mountain's foot. An ancient lament preserves the name:—

I saw the lightning glare
Above the peak of Taupiri;
There the thousands of thy people sleep—
They sleep upon the plain of Tangirau.