Little Lake Within a Lake.

Hurae steered for a mound of an island smothered in green to the water's edge. This was Te Kaha-o-Tuwai; he wanted to show us a curious place; a lake in the heart of the island. We startled some meditative wild duck as we rowed round an outjutting point where an ancient rata tree bent its boughs downward until the red blossoms almost touched the water.

“This was a very fine safe place to hide,” he said. We made fast to the big tree, and climbed up a steep bank by a mossy notched log. The island rose about twenty-five to thirty feet above the lake level; it was matted everywhere with bush and ferns.

A few paces from the top of the little cliff took us to a lakelet which filled the heart of the island. It was a silent amber pool—about a hundred yards across, or perhaps less. Mystic, haunted by the presence of all ancient things. Cumbered on its edges with snags and tree-stumps, slippery with the moss and water-weed of ages. Not a sound on its shores but the voices of our four pakehas and the Maori.

Not a bird sang in the trees here. The tawai trees—the beech, popularly miscalled birch—were ancient beyond all reckoning. Their boughs were twisted and contorted into strange shapes; many were white and dead, and everywhere from their branches trailed beards and weepers of grey moss. A ghostly place; it recalled a page 11 Dore picture of the vast and gloomy woods at the rocky door to Avernus.

These dead trees, Hurae said, lay under the stroke of tapu and makutu. They had been bewitched by a tohunga of old. They looked it. But we did our best to dispel the ghostly atmosphere of Tuwai's Snare Island and the enchanted pool of shadows. We found a clear spot to boil the billy, under a big tree that stood midway between the island's lakelet and the lake below. The blue smoke curling up through the branches humanised the place; nothing like a billy-fire for a home-like and comfortable touch in the wilds. Hurae, after the tea and tucker, told more of the past, full of names of old-time warriors and olden camps, and marches, and bush battles. And another of the party told of the later days of war, for he, like Hurae, had had his part in the era of tupara and rifle and tomahawk.