THE “AHI-A-TAMATEA.”
HOW THE SACRED FIRE CAME TO WITCH HILL.
As we travel northward along the Summit Track from the Poho-o-Tamatea,
observing from this commanding height--a thousand feet above little
Rapaki village, lying in its grassy nest below--how that great
spearhead of rock has in reality an almost level top, we come to a
remarkable broken wall of grey lava moss-crusted and shrub-tufted,
protruding from the grassy flanks of the craggy knoll called Witch
Hill. It is in fact a huge dyke of once-molten lava, cutting wall-like
through the old lava flows and trending southward across the shoulder
of its parent hill. From the very crest of the range it shoots in a
palisade of frost-shattered rock, towering thirty feet and more in
places above the stone-strewn tussocks, and it stretches some distance
in irregular cyclopean steps down the steep slope towards Rapaki. There
is an old stone quarry on the face of Witch Hill, where this dyke juts
out like a broken castle wall of the _Patu-paiarehe_, the Dim
People of long ago, and just there the old waggon track goes down over
the smoothed-out hills to the Canterbury Plains and the green banks of
the Opaawaho.
[Illustration: Witch Hill.]
The Giants’ Causeway some fanciful _pakeha_ has named this wall of
lava. To the Maori it is the “Ahi-a-Tamatea” or “the Fire of Tamatea”,
and a strange nature legend there is thereto; a folk tale in which
fable and geologic myth are curiously blended. It is a volcano myth
which closely resembles, and is no doubt a copy of, the North Island
legend of Ngatoro-i-Rangi and the origin of the Ngauruhoe volcano. The
march downhill of this curious upstanding dyke of lava, grey against
the more sombre tints of the range, may be traced in the masses of
lava boulders through which the Rapaki water-course has cut its way
in its lustier days. And if you turn your face southward and look
far across the upper part of the harbour, near the western slopes
of Mount Herbert, you will plainly see what seems a continuation of
the remarkable wall of lava which welled ages ago white-hot from the
cauldrons of Ruaimoko. Those grey-white parapets of fire-made rock are
the Ashes of the Fires of Tamatea, and this is the wonderful tale of
Tamatea and his magic fire, a tale of old which brings in, too, our
great arrowhead peak, towering yonder on Rapaki’s western side, yon
huge upjut lording it sentry-wise over the Maori _kainga_. The peak
of “Tamatea’s Breast,” is one of the very few landscape saliencies
in these parts which still remain in the hands of the people of
Takitimu descent. A venerable name this, for it is quite six hundred
years old and is a connecting link with the greatest land-explorer in
Maori-Polynesian story, a prototype of the adventurous “Kai-ruri,” the
white surveyor of _pakeha_ pioneering days.
Tamatea seems to have been possessed of the true “wander-hunger,” for
when he arrived on the shores of the North Island in his ocean-going
canoe the Takitimu (or Takitumu) from his Eastern Pacific home--Tahiti
or one of the neighbouring islands--via Rarotonga--his restless heart
impelled him to more adventure. First making the land in the far
north, he voyaged on down the East Coast, sailing and paddling from
bay to bay, leaving here and there some of his sea-weary crew, who
intermarried with the inhabitants, and he did not cease his sailorly
enterprise until he had reached the foggy shore of Murihiku, the “Tail
of the Land” which the white man calls Southland. Here the Takitimu
was hauled ashore and if one is to accept literally the legend of the
Maori, there she is to be seen now, metamorphosed in marvellous fashion
into mountain form, the lofty blue range of the Takitimu--mis-spelled
“Takitimos” on the maps and locally spoken of as “the Takitimos.”
It is curious that this isolated range--fairy-haunted in native
legend--lifting abruptly on all sides from the tussocky plains that
slope to Lake Manapouri, from more than one point bears a resemblance
to the form of a colossal canoe upturned. Legend, too, says that
Tamatea settled awhile at the foot of the Canoe Mountains, and that he
had a camp village at the lower end of Lake Te Anau, where eels and
birds were abundant.
[Illustration: The Summit Road, overlooking Governor’s Bay.
_C. Beken, photo_
]
Then, wearying for the trail and the _pikau_, he set out on a march
which was nothing less than heroic, from Southland to the newly-settled
homes of his people in the North. With a number of companions and
food bearers the barefooted explorer trudged across country, through
the unpeopled tussock prairies of Otago and the plains now known as
Canterbury, fording or swimming the rivers or crossing them on rude
rafts (_mokihi_) made of bundles of flax-stalks or of dried _raupo_,
until he reached the hills that wall in Lyttelton Harbour. He travelled
along the range-top, as was the way of the Maori explorer, until he
neared the dip in the sharp ridge at the back of Rapaki, over which the
Maoris and the pioneer white men made a track.
Now, Tamatea had carried with him, in a section of a hollow _rata_
log, as was the fashion of the Maori, a smouldering fire for his
nightly camps. No common fire this; it was an _ahi-tipua_,
a “magic blaze,” a sacred fire directly kindled from that
trebly-_tapu_ fire which Uenuku, the great high priest of far
Hawaiki, had sent with his canoe voyagers. The Takitimu, being a
_tapu_ canoe, carried no cooked food, and the only plants the
people brought in her were ornamental ones, for scent and beauty and
sweet flowers. She was a great double canoe, and could carry two
hundred people. Her consort was the canoe Arai-te-uru, which carried
“Te Ahi-a-Uenuku--Uenuku’s Fire”--and all kinds of food plants, even,
says Tikao, a grain which is said to have resembled the _pakeha’s_
wheat. Coming round Te Matau-a-Maui, Hawke’s Bay, the Arai-te-Uru
nearly capsized; she went over on her side, and continued in that
attitude until she finally overturned at Matakaea Point, near Oamaru,
where she still lies--turned to stone! The sacred fire was saved and
it was taken by the chiefs up the Waitaki River and placed there in
the ground; and there until about forty-five years ago it was still
actually burning, issuing from the earth in a little undying flame, and
it was called “Te Ahi a Uenuku.” (A seam of lignite is said to have
been found burning in the locality by the early settlers and explorers,
and this the Maoris identified with the Hawaikian sorcerer’s magic
blaze.)
But it seems that Tamatea’s fire so carefully tended by the gods went
out as he travelled slowly up the hills from Otago, and none had
been kindled again when he reached the Port Hills. And as he and his
companions came out of the bush and passed out on to the summit of the
mountain above Rapaki, a great storm of wind and rain, followed by
hail and snow, burst upon them from the south and they were like to
perish from the cold. It was freezing cold, and Tamatea was without
fire or the means of making one, for no fire-making timbers grew in
that spot. In his extremity he stood upon the tall crag-top yonder--the
one that now is called “The Breast of Tamatea”--and called aloud and
_karakia’d_ and made incantations for sacred fire to be sent
from the North Island, the land of active volcanoes, to save the
lives of himself and his companions. He called to his elder relative,
Ngatoro-i-Rangi, and to the guardians of the Ahi-Tipua, the volcanic
fires.
And the chief’s fervent prayer was answered in a moment. The fire,
sent by the gods in the heart of the North Island, burst forth from
Tongariro and speeding down the rift of the Wanganui River valley it
touched a spot near Nelson, and again it touched Motu-nau--the small
island close to the Canterbury Coast--and then it appeared again in a
magic blaze on the side of Witch Hill, and the Maori explorers warmed
their frozen limbs and were saved. The fire did not stop here in its
wonderful flight, for it went on across the harbour, and the white
chute of rock, like a huge sheep-dip trough, shining yonder above the
bay of Waiaki is the last of the sacred flames of Tamatea.
And when the chief left the spot next day to continue his
journey he said, “Let this place be called The Place where
Tamatea’s Fire-Ashes Lie”; and so to-day the rocky wall which
the white man has named the Giant’s Causeway is to the Maori “Te
Whaka-takanga-o-te-Karehu-a-Tamatea.” And the volcanic fire itself is
“Te Ahi-a-Tamatea.”
Such is the story of Tamatea’s Fire as told by Hone Taare Tikao, in
reciting the legends learned from the long-dead elders of his tribe.
A legend embalming a distinct perception of the geological history of
these hills. The _Kaumatua_ truly says that the magical walls of
Tamatea’s Fire Ashes are of later origin than the volcanic crags and
hills which lie about them, and across which they cut. The Wanganui
River, down which the sacred fire came from the crater of Ngauruhoe,
was then dry; it was a rift opened for it by the Volcano Gods. Tikao
speaks of a time when the lower part of Lyttelton Harbour was not in
eruption, but when the upper part was; from the southern side of Quail
Island to the head of the bay was a furnace; there was no water in it
at that immeasurably distant day. There are lava rocks, he says, like
those of the Ahi-a-Tamatea on the shore of Quail Island; and then there
are the always wonderful cliff of Pari-mataa and the wall of Otarahaka
on the Mount Herbert side of the upper harbour.
Of the lava dykes Professor R. Speight writes in his account of the
geology of the Port Hills that they radiate from the harbour as a
centre and form, as it were, the ribs of the mountain, holding it
firmly together and helping it to resist the enormous strains to
which it was exposed before and during eruptions. “Judging from the
persistent nature of these dykes,” he adds, “it is clear that the
mountain must have been split at times from top to bottom, and the
liquid material which welled from the fissures must have looked at night
like a red-hot streak across the country.”
[Illustration: Te Poho-o-Tamatea, or Tamatea’s Breast, in the middle
distance.
_W. A. Taylor, photo_
]
And so, by way of the long Maori story, the one solitary example of
volcano-legendry the writer has heard from the South Island, we come
to the Rapaki peak’s guardian name, Te Poho-o-Tamatea. The explorer
bestowed his name upon the height, _tapa-ing_ it after himself
and his sacred breast, much as a present-day traveller justly might
claim the right to map-name some peak after himself. Tamatea’s travels
led him far after he turned his back on the Port Hills. He marched
up on the coast to Kaikoura, and there or further north he built a
canoe, or, what is more probable, borrowed or forcibly appropriated
one belonging to the _tangata whenua_ who must already have been
living in the Marlborough country, and crossed to the North Island.
He canoed up the Wanganui River--there is a curious rock, the end
of which the natives used to paint red with _kokowai_ ochre,
projecting from the eastern bank many miles above Pipi-riki, still
known as Tamatea’s Rock--and crossed the central plateau to Lake
Taupo, and thence went on to the East Coast. There are innumerable
stories illustrating his genius for exploration, and from end to end
of New Zealand place nomenclature memorises his travels and justifies
the name by which he is known in history, Tamatea-pokai-whenua,
or “Tamatea-who-travels-through-the-land.” He was a true type of
the pioneer and the path-finder, the Fremont of Aotea-roa and the
Wai-pounamu, the man who heard the “one everlasting Whisper”--
Something hidden. Go and find it. Go and look behind the Ranges--
Something lost behind the Ranges. Lost and waiting for you. Go!