Their Mountain God.

The Maori of old perfectly well understood the protective value of the forests and the life and fertility that its streams carried into the plains. There is a chant that was sung with tremendous patriotic fire and vigour at the great gathering at Manawapou, in South Taranaki, when the Maori Land League was established over seventy years ago. It begins with the passionate declaration, “Taranaki shall not be cast away to the pakeha,” and it likens the many shining rivers to the source of life, the fertilising fluid of mankind.

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The passionate love of the Maori for their “matua,” their parent, as they called Egmont, was embodied in a great war song chanted on a certain historic occasion on Moturoa beach at New Plymouth, and sung to this day at tribal gatherings. “Draw near to us Taranaki!” the warriors chanted as they stretched forth their guns and tomahawks to the mountain in response to their chieftain's call. “Draw close to us, close to our hearts, that we may embrace thee, that we may clasp thee ever to our hearts!” It makes a tremendous chorus, this “Nukunuku mai, nekeneke mai, ki taku tauaro, kikini, kikini a-i!”

There is a beautiful chant of a softer kind, the song of admiration and love for the ancestral mountain, as recited to me long ago by the venerable lady MéAréeA Ngamai o te Wharepouri; she sleeps the long sleep overshadowed by the mountain she adored. It likens the snowy peak to a white and spotless flax garment, the parawai:—

“Enchanting to the eye
Art thou, O Taranaki;
Clothed in thy snowy garment.
O mountain gloriously arrayed
In white and spotless cloak,
With fringe of patterned taniko,
A robe of radiant beauty!

You cloud that wreaths thy lofty brow
Is a mourning chaplet,
A band of kawakawa leaves.
Emblem of sorrow for the dead,
Love circlet for the vanished ones
That we shall see no more.”

The reference here is to a small round dark cloud that sometimes rests on the mountain top. The Maoris call this the pare or head-wreath of Taranaki, A wreath of kawakawa or koromiko leaves is an emblem of mourning for the dead; the cloud on the mountain is a portent of death or a token of sympathy with mourners at the tangi. The mountain weeps with her children that live on the plains below.