Caves of Legend.

Sometimes we have glimpses into caves in the cliffs, overhung by drooping ferns and trailing forest-creepers and the ever-present bunches of hanging kiekic. Ruru-popo is one of these caves, a deep dark cavern on the riverside, proper right bank.

“This is a vision for the rest of life.”—Robert Patterson.
(Govt. Publicity photo.)
The enchanting “Drop Scene” on the world-famed Wanganui River, North Island, New Zealand.

Another cave on this same side is Puraroto, where once upon a time, according to Reone's legends, a fearsome taniwha, or man-devouring monster, had lived.

Yet another cave is a picture to entrance the eye and excite the imagination. It is on the east, or left bank, nearly opposite the Puraroto cave and stream. At the foot of a horseshoeshaped indent or recess in the precipice there is a little level spit, densely grown with plumey ferntrees, and behind is the ana, the cave. Over the rocky front of the cave fall two cascades, twin fountains of silver leaping out from unseen streams.

This singularly lovely spot—albeit an uncomfortably damp one— is called Tu-ka-iriao. It was one of the dwelling places of a small Maori tribe long ago. The rivermen's stockaded pa was on a terrace far above, and to this terrace the people climbed by rough ladders made of the vines of the aka, a tough forest creeper.

In many places along this Place of Cliffs such bush ladders were the only means of reaching the villages. When enemies essayed to scale this precipice the Tu-ka-iriao men cut the aka, and then there were broken heads and limbs among the invaders.

Also, the warriors of this wild gorge camped in the cave on the look-out for intruders poling up the rapids, and the encounter was usually disastrous to the strangers.

Very few invaders got any satisfaction out of fighting the ambuscade-loving Whanganui and Ngati-Hau.

A local proverbial expression, Te Koura putaroa, likens the river tribes to a crayfish, which could always escape its strong foes by retreating into the caves between the cliffs and up the deep defiles, or pounce upon weak ones with its nipping claws. In the Mangaio gorge up yonder, in the narrowest part, where a swift creek comes out of a deep gloomy defile, a war-canoe expedition, under the Northern chief Tuwhare was almost annihilated, a little over a century ago, by the river tribes who gathered here and page 28 rolled rocks and logs down on the canoe crews as they slowly poled up close under the perpendicular papa walls.