MOUNTAIN GRAVES

Evening Star, Issue 18263, 1 May 1923, Page 1

MOUNTAIN GRAVES

SOME NEW ZEALAND BESTING PLACES. Cecil Rhodes. Stevenson, and others ere buried high above the world’ they enriched ; hut pagan people and the romantic natives of the South Seas and New Zealand chose mountain burial places with similar appreciation for the isolated loneliness, the dignity and beauty which wa find about hills and the greater peaks that, at night, wear the Very, stars in ( their hair.

In Cape Town the tomb of Cecil Rhodes stands as an almost immortal symbol of th 3 greatness of the distinguished man. High upon the fragrant peak of Mount Vaea, in Samoa, Stevenson lies, within hearing of the great Pacific that moans and surges about the coral reefs.. Here again the Samoan natives, seeking to bury their “Tusitala” with tho reverence with which they lived with him, chose the nearest hill, and forced a road to tho summit, breaking through tho undergrowth and finally, _ after hours of unswerving fortitude, carried the body of Stevenson high above the tropical island where he made his home. And now the simple stone tomb, which I have seen in a hot, vivid noon, with gulls sweeping overhead, rests among the tropical trees which are drunk with blossoms m the given season. New Zealand, with its network of nvers and pattern of hills, has many peaks which are. sacred because of some departed pioneer who was buried high above the land he helped and enriched with his labor. On One Tree Hill, in Auckland, you will find the grave of Sir Robert Logon Campbell, the father of Auckland. Curiously enough, One Tree Hill* derives its name from a clump of four or five trees that shake their branches within, a few yards of tho lonely grave of the great Campbell. H© was one -of the men who made New Zealand, lifting it from tho cloud of native ignorance and sowing the first seeds of success in its virgin soil. And when he died they carried him up the hillside and buried 'him where hie grave would look out over the country he had helped and enriched. I know another hill, Maisiand Hill, in New Plymouth, where they buried the groat friend of Keats—Charles Armitage Brown —who went there some vears after the poet dicd_ in Rome, this historic hill was in tho thick of the Maori War, and, when it was barricaded in one campaign, the grave of Brown was lost. But a few months ago they found it again, and now it looks out over the sea that Brown had crossed in that distant day when New Zealand was in -swaddling dollies. . . On the highest point m the Northern Island, of New Zealand-9,000ft above the sea—is a boiling lake. This steaming water is on the summit of Mount Ruapehu, set in the midst of everlasting snow, above the clouds, beyond sight or hearing of tho world that whirls and whines beloHere. in the shadowy yesterdays before the white men came, the .Maoris buried their chieftains, carrying their bodies up the gaunt, ice-bound mountain side and lowering them into the mysterious lake that steams and boils with the snow about its edge. Mount Ruapehu stands in the centre of the island, and 1 the quiet, undisturbed country from which it rises is flooded with romance. Nirauruboe, faery volcano, stains the midnight skies within a few miles of Ruapehu. Great rivers trickle into being against Ruapehu’s snowy bosom. And there, high above the world, on the skysweeping peak, the Natives chase the burial place of their chieftains in the_ long ago, when the moa strutted majestically across the plains of Aotearoa. Even nowadays, when Native romanticism has given place to respectable and uninteresting maAle headstones, the Maoris choose hills for their graves, and in aajd : about Rotorua will find l solitary fingers of stone pointing to the sky and. telling you in gold letters that the great chief' is “at rest in peace. —Hector Bolitho. in the ‘Forum.’