HILLS OF FAERY.
THE LITTLE PEOPLE OF THE MIST.
Our talk turned one day to the poetic legendary past of the Port Hills
above us and the Banks Peninsula peaks yonder, hemming in Lyttelton
Harbour in an annular line of dead fire crags. They were the hills
of an artist’s dream this golden afternoon, all their asperities of
crag and bare bluff softened and gilded by the mellow light of a calm,
bright, windless day. There was just the faintest of hazy films drawing
over the nearer hills from the waters. The sea below us at Rapaki lay
in unbreathing quiet, as soft, as bright and blue as Kipling’s Indian
Ocean. The rich purple of distance painted the most remote of the
Peninsula peaks, and here and there a wispy tail of mist floated about
the head of a gully that cleft the crumpled hills swelling up into the
rocky summits of the Pohue and the Ahu-patiki. Just where the land went
steeply up from the head of the bay to the shoulders of Te Ahu-Patiki,
otherwise Mount Herbert, we could see the curious light grey rock wall
of the Tarahaka, above the Pari-mataa, “Obsidian Cliff,” like a great
chute down the mountain side, gleaming in the sun, the _tipua_
rock of the fire gods. Nearer, in the middle of the picture, were the
black volcanic cliffs, and the green slopes and pine-groves of the
Lepers’ Isle, the island which the Maoris of old called Otamahua,
mapped by the _pakeha_ as Quail Island; it was one tragic spot in
the picture, a place of living death.
The _Kaumatua_ spoke of the hilltop homes of the
_Patu-paiarehe_, the fairies, whose craggy castles defended by
the thick dark woods and the fogs and mists, ringed all this harbour
round and made the high places of the Peninsula an uncanny land, given
up to all manner of enchantments. Not that he reposed implicit faith in
the fairy stories himself, he told them as he had heard them from his
elders in the days of long ago. “We are half _pakeha_ ourselves
now, we Ngai-Tahu,” he said, “and our young people deride these notions
about the _Patu-paiarehe_. Yet--these hills were different in my
young days, when the mists came down and the fog enveloped the little
streams tumbling down all the valleys from the gloomy places. We went
birding into the forest, and we made clearings for cultivations and cut
firewood in the bush for sale to the _pakeha_. Sometimes, when the
mists came down and the fog enveloped the hills, on still, calm days
our old men and women would say the fairies were out, the sun-shunning
_Patu-paiarehe_, and it were well not to venture up the range. On
brooding quiet days our people could hear the thin voices of the little
folk--they were small, fair people, as all the elders said--crying
out to each other and singing fairy songs and playing little songs on
their wooden or bone flutes, their _koauau_ and _putorino_.
This Poho-o-Tamatea, the high peak behind the _kainga_ of Rapaki,
was one of their homes, their _pas_, but there were others, the
high places of the fairies, all around these hills, from my peak above
there right away along the peak-tops touched by the Summit Road, right
round to Cooper’s Knobs and then on to the Peninsula, even to Otoki,
the haunted mountain which the _pakeha_ calls Brazenose, on the
southern side of Akaroa town.”
[Illustration: Rhodes’s Monument (Home of the Fairies), to the east of
Mt. Herbert, taken from Lyttelton.
_W. A. Taylor, photo_]
The _Kaumatua_ swept his finger across the southern sky-line, the wild
and broken peaks of Banks Peninsula, rising up in powerful slants
from the soft blue of the harbour, creased with the gullies of
water-courses. “Over yonder,” he said, “are the chief _pas_ of the
_Patu-paiarehe_, which I shall list for you: There is the rock of
Te Pohue, which _pakehas_ call the Monument between Purau and Port
Levy; there is Hukuika Peak, on the hill road between Pigeon Bay and
Little River; there is the mountain-top of Te U-Kura, which commands
all the hill-country of the Peninsula--it is just at the back of
the stopping-place called Hilltop on the road from Little River to
Akaroa town. Also there are the high rocky peaks which overlook Akaroa
Harbour--Pu-Waitaha, or French Hill, between Wainui settlement and
Buchanan’s; Otehore, a rocky flat-topped height above French Farm, on
the upper part of the harbour; the summit heights above Akaroa town,
Purple Peak, Mount Berard and Brazenose--these we call O-te-Patatu,
Tara-te-rehu, and Otoki; and lastly Tuhiraki, the sky-pencilling peak,
which the French named Mount Bossu, on the western side of the harbour.
All these were the mountain _pas_ of the fairies.
“Now, amongst the fairy _pas_,” the word-of-mouth historian went
on, “there are two places of particular enchantment. One is that lofty
palisade of a peak which you call Brazenose, and the level-topped
hill above French Farm. Otoki--the Place of the Axe--is the name for
Brazenose, but there is an ancient burying-ground there, upon the
misty mountain immediately above the little Maori village of Onuku,
on the beach side, which is called Otehore; the _Wahi-tapu_, or
cemetery, makes it doubly sacred. This place and the height above
French Farm were both called Otehore, and the people of the mists loved
them well. On the small piece of level ground on that Otehore which
stands above French Farm the fairy _hapu_ of those parts had
their _pa_, and there they would gather at night for their fairy
meetings, and gather by day also in the foggy weather when no Maori eye
could see them; and then would be heard their sweet fairy songs, their
_waiatas_, and the tunes they played upon their flutes, sounding
faintly from the cloudy mountain.”
Indeed, on dim and foggy days, and when the wet vapours becloud
the long-dead volcano land, it is not difficult to enter into the
spirit of the Maori fancy, and in imagination people all these craggy
pinnacles with the _Patu-paiarehe_, and the wooded gulches with
_Maeroero_, the wild men of the bush. When the mists steal down
on the rhyolite knobs of the fire-fused Port Hills and the Peninsula,
craggy beyond description, peaked in a hundred fantastic shapes, with
great black and grey nipples of lava protruding from the grassy slopes
and the woody ridges, the land has an eerie look, fit playground
for the Forgetful People, as the old Irish would have called them.
In the early morning too, when the fogs are lifting from the bays,
and here and there a black broken thumb of a peak juts out above the
trailing vapours, or the mist-wreaths drape in torn veilings the huge
rampart-like scarps, and when the first rosy sunbeams glorify the
half-revealed mountains, the poetic mind can well conceive of this
region as one of fairy wizardry and all manner of dusk-time magic. One
day when it rained and blew, we were motoring over the hills from the
Plains to Akaroa, scarcely able to see twenty yards in front of the car
when we ran cautiously round to Hilltop. Suddenly the dense masses of
fog were rent aside by the wind, and right above us, with a fore-ground
of blackened tree-stumps, remnant of the ruined forest, we caught a
glimpse of the black, jagged tor which the Maori called Te Puha, thrust
up like a great spearhead by Ruaimoko, the Fire-God; in the light of
the _Kaumatua’s_ stories it was easy to imagine it a sentry-tower
of the fairies, or of such a place of witchery as the Ben Bulben of
which we read in W. B. Yeats’s “Celtic Twilight.”
There is another rugged, dark volcanic crag, wooded about its base,
crowning one of these Peninsula ridges, of which the Old Man of
Rapaki has a poetic story. This is the pinnacle above and to the
north of the Hilltop Hotel, on the divide where the traveller gets
his first sight of Akaroa lying more than a thousand feet below. The
_Kaumatua_ gave it as one of his fairy peaks, its Native name is
Te U-Kura, and as far as I have been able to ascertain, it bears no
official _pakeha_ name. Te U-Kura, he says, is an exceedingly
ancient designation; it was a name given by the fairies. It means “The
Resting Place of the Ruddy Light.” In his younger days, when he lived
at Tikao Bay, on the shores of Akaroa harbour, he frequently observed
for himself the peculiar fitness of the Hilltop name. Often at sunset
a cloud-cap would rest lightly on the dark skull of the fairy crag,
and to this cloud the declining sun would impart a bright red glow,
the _kura_ of the Maori. This was a sign to the weather-wise that
a nor’-wester was blowing on the Canterbury Plains--a _tohu_, or
token, that was seldom astray. “U” means to rest, as a canoe upon the
beach. This surely is a name that the _pakeha_ should imprint upon
his Peninsula maps. It lends itself to more than one euphonious variant
in the _pakeha_-tongue, as “Red Cloud’s Rest,” or “Place of the
Sunset’s Glow.”
Behind the town of Akaroa, the grassy hills, lightly wooded here and
there like a beautiful wild park, culminate in a craggy skyline,
more than a thousand feet above the fields and orchards on the town
outskirts. Dark tors of rhyolite, grassed to the base of
[Illustration:
Cockayne’s Cairn Cass Peak
Kennedy’s Bush.
_W. A. Taylor, photo_
]
their nippled upswells, dreamy on sunny days in their delicate
wash of hazy blue. Here near the Stony Bay road saddle, is the
legend-haunted O-te-Patatu, the old-time ridge of the fairies and the
_titi_. The _titi_ or muttonbird has long since disappeared
from the Port and Peninsula hills, but in the Maori days it was
plentiful on many such high places. It loved to build on lofty hills,
where the soil was soft enough to enable it to make its burrows.
There was a cliff at O-te-Patatu, says the _Kaumatua_, where
the _titi_ lived and bred in great numbers in the long ago.
The Maori tribes who lived on the beaches and on the trenched and
parapeted promontories made expeditions to the hilltop in the season
when the young birds were fat, and caught, cooked and preserved them
in kelp baskets and pottles, just as the Foveaux Strait and Stewart
Island Maoris do at the present time. But the _Patu-paiarche_
who lived on the crags of O-te-Patatu and Tara-te-rehu also hunted
these _titi_, and slaughtered them in such numbers, in a most
unfairylike manner, that presently these fishy petrels became extinct
in that locality. A woman of the Ngai-Tahu, or Ngati-Mamoe, at Akaroa,
who was said to be in love with a fairy, but who no doubt also loved
the palatable muttonbird, chanted this little _waiata_, a song
of fairy times which is still to be heard at Rapaki and other Native
villages:--
Titi whakatai aro rua
E hoki ra koe
Ki O-te-Patatu,
Ki te pa whakatangi
Ki te koauau,
Ki tauwene ai
E raro i au-e!
(Translation)
O titi, bird of the sea,
Bird of the hilltop cave,
Come back to O-te-Patatu,
To the lofty dwelling
Where the sweet sounds are heard,
The sound of the faery flute,
The music of the mountains
That thrilled me through and through!
The soft and plaintive flute song of the fair-skinned folk who lived
on these misty mountains seems to have appealed to the Native heart,
for it is described as sweeter by far than the _whakatangitangi_,
the “making sound upon sound,” of the ordinary Maori flute-players.
Distance, aided by imagination, no doubt lent it additional
enchantment. And the _Patu-paiarehe_ men appear often to have
made themselves agreeable to the _wahine_ Maori, for stories are
told of women being taken as wives by the fairy chiefs, and of girls
from the Maori villages wandering away into the woods to meet their
fairy lovers. The offspring of such unions were always known by their
extremely fair skins, unnaturally pale, and their light flaxen hair;
they were _korako_ or albinos.
And there was another people of the wilds. Sometimes on dark nights
the Maori villagers would see the light of torches moving about in
bays across Lyttelton Harbour, then the Bay of Raupo, where they knew
there was no settlement of their tribe, and they would say to each
other, “See! The _Maeroero_ are out, spearing _patiki_.” The
_Maeroero_ were the wild men of the woods, fierce hairy giants who
sometimes captured Maori women and carried them off to be their wives
in the bush of the Port Hills. The _Maeroero_ are described as
having very long and sharp finger-nails, so long that they were great
claws, and it was with these long talons that they speared the flatfish
and caught the birds in the forests.
[Illustration: The Summit Road
pathway, through the Devil’s Staircase, or The Remarkable Dykes (on the
way to Kaituna)]
To the matter-of-fact _pakeha_ and the modernised Maori there is a
very simple explanation of these fairy tales. The _Patu-paiarehe_ and
the _Maero_ were simply the remnants of aboriginal tribes, such as
the Ngati-Mamoe or the Waitaha or their predecessors, driven away into
the heart of the mountains and the forests, where they lived a wild,
secluded life, existing on the foods of the wilderness. The old English
and Scottish belief in fairy people arose in much the same way, the
very word “pixy” comes from the name of the Picts, who were driven
into the hills and caves. Nevertheless, for those who like to preserve
their Peter Pan fancies and illusions this theory may cheerfully be
disregarded, and we may still, on days of mist and cloudy calm, imagine
the little tribes of the rocks flitting out from their caves and hollow
trees and raising as of old their thin voices in their _waiatas_ and
piping their fairy sweet _koauau_ music on the level hilltop of Otehore
or the dark rock of Tamatea’s Breast.
MOUNT PLEASANT AND ITS “TAPU.”
Now the Old Man’s memories take him back seawards across the Port Hills
to the familiar knolls of Tauhinu-Korokio. This is the Native name
of Mount Pleasant, the great grassy upswell of land lifting sixteen
hundred feet above sea-level and looking down serenely on the vast
curving sand-line of Pegasus Bay. The Maori name is a combination
of the names of two Native shrubs which were very plentiful on that
portion of the hills in former times and specimens of which may still
be seen there. _Tauhinu_ is a heath-like plant found all over New
Zealand; it is the Pomaderis phylicaefolia of the botanists. It grows
two or three feet high, or sometimes higher, and it is so plentiful
and so prone to spread that it has been placed on the Agricultural
Department’s index expurgatorious as a noxious weed, in spite of
all the sweet heathery perfume of its blossoms which the bees love.
The _korokio_ is a small bushy black-branched growth which the
_tauhinu_, as the Maoris say, often embraces and smothers,
as the _rata_ eventually smothers the tree which it clasps.
Tauhinu-korokio was an ancient _pa_ of Ngati-Mamoe which stood on
the site of Major Hornbrook’s old homestead and the present house of
[Illustration: Hinekura.
_J. Cowan, photo_]
stay for visitors, just below a remnant of the ancient bush on the
northern and sunny slope of the green mountain. There was a good spring
of water close by, and this important fact no doubt determined the
situation of the Ngati-Mamoe hillmen’s village. In Ngai-Tahu times,
after Te Rangi-Whakaputa had conquered this _pa_ in the course of his
subjugation of the Whaka-Raupo aborigines, the vicinity was found by
the Ngai-Tahu to be a very suitable spot for such vegetable foods as
the _korau_ and the _pora_, or _pohata_, now extinct; the roots, which
were sweet, were dried in the sun and stored in _ruas_, or underground
pits and earthed-in storehouses, as potatoes and _kumara_ are now.
_Kumara_ and _taro_, the tropic foods of the north, did not flourish in
the hill country of the south, though they did well enough, with care,
on favoured parts of the Canterbury Plains and the Coast.
There is in Maori belief an exceedingly _tapu_ spot on
Tauhinu-korokio, close to where the old Ngati-Mamoe _pa_ stood.
It was probably either a _tuahu_ or a burying-place; the
_tuahu_ was the spot where the tribal gods, or, rather, their
symbols in wood and stone, were kept, and where the wise men, the
_tohungas_, resorted for incantation and occult ceremonies and
the black art of the _makutu_, by which enemies might be slain
though they were at a great distance, by thought transmission and the
malignant projection of the will. It is not well to camp there even
now, should you have Maori blood in your veins. The flax-clumps and the
_tauhinu_ bushes still murmur the name of Ngati-Mamoe, and though
_pakeha_ sheep have long grazed over the site of Tauhinu-korokio
and _pakeha_ voices make lively the mountain side, the soil holds
the mysterious spell of the _tapu_. Maoris who have camped on the
side of the track which goes over the hills there have spent a night of
inexplicable discomfort, inexplicable, that is, but for the presence of
the _tapu_ and the unseen spirits of Maoridom. Taare Tikao himself
says that many years ago, when he was shearing at Major Hornbrook’s,
he was taken suddenly and mysteriously ill, and that the illness was
probably the effect of the local _tapu_. However, these fancies
need not trouble the _pakeha_, whose constitution is not affected
by even the most virulent of Maori bedevilments.
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