The Buried Village.

The tragic end of kinglike Heuheu, with fifty of his tribespeople, in 1846, is spoken of to this day by the old people of the Taupo country as an act of the Maori gods. It was the gods of wild nature at any rate; the forces of Ruwaimoko against which man is powerless. The story of that historic landslide from Hipaua's steam-soaked and flooded slopes was told me by one of the only three people who escaped from Te Rapa village.

This survivor, whom I was fortunate enough to find at Waihi village in the year 1900—fifty-four years after the disaster which entombed his people—was a white-haired ancient warrior named Tokena te Kerehi. He was one of the younger sons of the great Te Heuheu. He said he was grown up and tattooed on the body as well as the face, at the time of the midnight landslip. His narrative, which I have placed on record, is too long to reproduce here; but one or two leading incidents may be mentioned.

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He said that the high priest Te Pahau had prophesied that Te Heuheu would not die by the hand of man, but by the stroke of the gods; and truly this was fulfilled. There was a thunderstorm early on the night of the disaster, and it was alarming to the people of Te Heuheu's household, and seemed to threaten the village as the lightning flashed downward and the guns of heaven crashed. Te Heuheu took his famous sacred greenstone máeráe Pahikaure in hand, a weapon of wondrous mana, and climbing to the roof of his house he essayed to quell the spirits of earth and sky. He loudly recited his prayers to avert the death-stroke from the sky, and after thus invoking the gods of his race and the spirits of his sacred ancestors he returned to his house. It was in the midnight hours when all but one or two were asleep that that destruction fell on the kainga. Te Rapa was close to the lake shore, fair in the mouth of the valley of the Wai-mataii and the steamy gulch and slopes of Hipaua. It was a challenge to fate. A fortunate wakeful one was young Tokena te Kerehi. When the hillside came down and buried the village he was outside his house; he was restless, for the night was ominous. He was all but buried as he ran—there was no time to warn the sleepers—and only escaped at last by climbing up a leaning tree, a moari or swinging tree of the young people, at the lake edge. Old Heuheu might have escaped but he tried to save his wives. When the horror-stricken people from the other villages gathered, and, after many days, were able to dig out the buried chief and his household, they found his favourite wife lying near him with the precious myáeráe Pahikaure, the sacred talismanic weapon of the family, clasped to her breast. The chief's house was the only one uncovered. The great hole dug there was still to be seen when I was there in 1900. The other houses overwhelmed were left under the deep covering of clay.

In the year 1910, the bones of the great Heuheu were searched for on Tongariro. The cave in which they were deposited in 1850 was found, and the skeleton was recovered and brought down to Waihi. A few days later another horo or landslide came down the water-logged steaming valley alongside the landslide of 1846; it was a larger slip which went out a long way into the lake. There was only one person killed by this slip, which took place in the daytime. A curious coincidence, one of several strange occurrences at that time discussed by the Maoris.

The late Te Heuheu Tukino, M.L.C., told me that the skull of his grandfather, which he viewed and wept over when it was borne down from the sacred mountain, was exceptionally large; and that the great man must have been 6 feet 5 inches or 6 feet 6 inches in height.