"HARA."
SHE was a Maori girl of, possibly, sixteen, and by profession a guide in the thermal district of Rotorua, and we yielded ourselves without a struggle to her guardianship when she stepped forward on the bridge at Whakarewarewa, wreathed in smiles and flourishing a silver-topped walking- stick with one hand while she bestowed vigorous handshakes upon us with the other. The village to which she welcomed us contained a few men, numbers of amphibious children, and a pack of undenominational dogs. Ereti, the chief guide, was mourning in the village meeting-house (wharehuz), for her old mother had died the night before; but Hara was her cousin and accredited substitute, and, after waving her stick towards the river which bounds Whakarewarewa on two sides to indicate the miscellaneous crowd of bathers in its chilly waters as an object worthy of a tourist's interest, she led us, all unconscious of her design, straight to the wharehui and firmly pushed us inside. It was an embarrassing introduction to the women of Hara's tribe, but resistance was out of the question. The floor was covered with mourners crouching round the bier, over which feathered quilts were thickly spread, and only the dark face of the dead woman, surmounted by heavy coils of iron-grey hair in which a couple of black-tipped
kuia quills were stuck, was visible. From the mass of mourners a stately figure detached itself. This was Ereti, who silently clasped our hands in a grip that was painful, and then resumed her place. Never have I seen a face expreesive of such intense sorrow. The still features might have been cast • in bronze for a bust of Grief itself. Another mourner rose and pressed our hands—Pera, Ereti's half-sister—but not one of us uttered a word. Hara's black eyes were full of tears when we turned to leave the wharehui, but, once outside, she permitted herself the " comic relief " of poking a stout Maori in the waistcoat with her wand of office, an overture which was kindly received and provoked no reprisals.
Brown imps were bathing out in the sunshine in little tanks of warm water and stretching out wet claws for the pennies we did not give them. Our guide led us to a round pool brimming with boiling water, blue as a solution of sapphires, that swirled and danced in its deep basin. "Here," she said, "we used to wash our clothes. But two years ago my uncle fell in and we could not get him out. He is here still ; but of course be is all to pieces now. Government will not let us wash here any more, and this railing has been put up to keep other people from falling in." This was said in the gentle, level English of the educated Maori, and appropriate comment, such as " How shocking I " died upon our lips. Hara wore a sailor-hat with a black ribbon (into which was tucked the inevitable huia quill), a black-and-white-striped cotton blouse and skirt, black stockings, and laced shoes. A more inoffensively commonplace costume could not be imagined. Even her pigtail of stiff, crinkly black hair was tied with the conventional wide white ribbon bow just as the pigtail of an English high-school girl is tied. But the boiling of an uncle would surely have been alluded to in terms more moving by the English high-school girl. Ham's uncle was as likely as not a cannibal at heart, if not in fact —opportunity being denied him by a paternal Government— and the words " we could not get him out " conveyed to our minds, warped by dwelling on the horrors of Maori history, the idea of a good housekeeper's regret for so much unavoid- able waste. Do vegetarians realise that New Zealand pro- duced no animal food whatever when the Maoris drifted thither in their war-canoes from the North, and that cannibalism was the natural result of this dearth P If there should ever be formed a community of "convinced" vegetarians ready to exile themselves to some far island well supplied only with the provender they affect, they would do well to read up the early history of New Zealand before embarking.
From the blue pool we climbed to Ereti's where, where a piano and a bookcase fall of standard works proclaimed its owner's high degree of intelligence and civilisation. Photo- graphs of Governors and Admirals once guided by Ereti were there in plenty, and the closely packed neatness of her little abode was that of the captain's cabin on board a mail steamer. As we made our way between high ti-hedges and across a wooden bridge to the mud-geysers, I asked Ham if there were any very old Maoris in Whakarewarewa who remembered the long war with the English. "Yes, there are some very old," she answered cheerfully, "but now we die very young ; many between twenty and thirty." This, alas I is sadly true. The civilisation which has dressed Hara in a black-and-white cotton frock, and tied up her pig- tail with a white ribbon, has brought with it the seeds of consumption. The feather-covered " mats " worn by the uncivilised Maori were thrown aside altogether when damp in the days before imported propriety exacted the habitual wearing of a complete costume ; but European garments composed mainly of cotton are not healthy when worn wringing wet, and the modern Maori has not yet learnt that they should be changed.
The old Maoris killed one another in fierce and never-ending tribal warfare; their descendants fall a ready prey to alcohol and to the germs of diseases undreamt of a century ago. In physique they are much inferior to their forefathers, and it was the passion for firearms that began the mischief. As long as they were spear-throwers and lived on high ground in fortified and almost inaccessible positions, whither they had to retire when attacked, the Maoris were a robust people; but with the advent of the musket they descended to the lowlands in the centre of areas fit for cultivation, and there erected dwellings adapted to the scope of their new weapons.
Enormous quantities of flax (scraped- by hand with a shell) were given in exchange for a single musket- and a small supply of ammunition, and the strain of incessant hard work in the flax swamps, combined with the semi-starvation caused by the inevitable neglect of their food-crops, sapped their vitality. What a text is here for the -peace-preservationist! But he must use it gingerly, for with spear, tomahawk, and mere (club) the untutored Maoris -had gone a long way towards mutual extermination before ever the use of the musket was known in their land. It is interesting to reflect that, although the peaee-preservationist and the Little Englander think we should be a much happier and holier race if we had never founded any colonies, they themselves, as a matter of fact, would have fared badly in the over- populated, under-victualled, and dependent England of their dreams. They might, indeed, have been eaten.
In spite of national defects and imported vices and failings, the Maori, of all coloured men, stands highest in one respect in the white man's estimation. A white man does not lose caste by marrying a Maori girl, and no New Zealander is ashamed of having Maori blood in his veins. Hera, who is waiting to show us a tiny boiling pool, actually no more than a hand's-breadth from the cool reed-fringed waters of the rushing brown river, may marry a -white man one day and be welcomed and respected by hispeople. She is -very 'brown, it is true, and her lips are undeniably thick; but the Maori head is as superior to the head of a West African negro as a nugget of gold is to a cake of soap or a cheap football.
The walking-stick now calls our attention to a group of mud-geysers, dirty grey, like much-handled semi-liquid putty, which bubble and squirt and cluck almost un. ceasingly. One of them grunts like a pig in a little well of its own, and some achieve the most grotesque and kaleidoscopic contortions as they chuckle and writhe. A gargoyle face with three ever-shifting eyes and pouting lips is the worst of all, and we stand and watch it till we can contemplate its peculiarly offensive ugliness no longer. Then Ham leads us on very carefully" (for a false step or a slight deviation from the narrow track might plunge us into a bottomless pit of boiling nastiness), and halts before the brush-concealed mouth of a rocky cave. " Here a chief was hidden for three years," she says. " His friends used to bring him food; but at last his enemies found him, and cut off his head and boiled his brains in the brain- pot over there." The " brain-pot," a round caldron of petrified mud, has run dry of late, but, like most of the pools and geysers in this district, it is probably intermittent in its activity. One important geyser, Waikifi, stopped spouting the very day, fourteen years ago, that the railway to Rotorua was opened, but woke up again eighteen months back. Another spouts every quarter of an hour, and a third every three minutes, so if the passer-by does not know their idio- syncrasies, and forgets to consider how the wind sits, douches of hot sulphur-scented water, worse far than those of the practically joking fountains of the Pallavicini Gardens at Genoa, may surprise him on his way.
Ham resolutely refuses a tip, and we part from her with much handshaking upon the bridge where we met. Looking back from the corner where the road bends away towards Rotorua, we see our little guide standing where we left her. She waves the cherrywood stick frantically. u Good lack, Atmirahl 1" she cries; and "ilia Ora [Good luck], Ham!"
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