The Tattooed Cliff.

Turn to a more peaceful picture, one that endures to this day, and will for many a day after we are gone. This is the wonderful precipice face called by the Maoris Te Pari a Tamahuka, or “Tamahuka's Cliff.”

It is passed about two-and-a-half miles before you reach Matata station, or three miles from the township on the lagoon. The gleaming white face of sandstone, overhung by pohutukawa trees, curves inward in a great cirque, and it is fretted and tattooed from base to summit with all manner of markings, wrought in page 24 the soft rock by ages of weather, and by gale-driven sand acting as an eroding and carving agent.

There are coiling spirals, zig-zag patterns, weird faces, grotesque gargoyles, in fact there is no limit to the number and variety of curious nature-carvings you may see there, designs varied from time to time by stress of wind and rain and nature's sand-papering.

Along this sandy trail many generations ago came a Maori artist in wood-carving, a man named Tamahuka. He gazed on this strange cliff; he admired, as we may admire to-day, the contrast of deep-green pohutukawa foliage and crimson flower and white-glinting cliff, and he studied the patterns which the gods of the weather had wrought on the vertical face. From those markings he drew inspiration for his art-craft; he saw there the rape, the taniko, and many another design, and when he trudged eastward again he carried mental pictures with him that he introduced into his carving for his East Cape kinsfolk.