MINARAPA'S TALE.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXII, Issue 18996, 18 April 1925, Page 1 (Supplement)

MINARAPA'S TALE.

A TWENTY.MILE VOYAGE. No. 11. BY W. 8., OTOROHANGA. This is the talo of Minarapa, who through mo continues the narrative of how his ancestors, a lowly people, exalted the heroes of their race; how they, too, unsnarled tho tangles that, be they of white or brown, of high or low estate, have webbed for them by fate. He was no orator, but his very halts and stammers were pauses to regain himself. To him these memories were the unwrapping!! of heillooms stored away in some forgotten cavern of tho brain, of no intrinsic value to any but those who heard and understood. Not ono of us smiled when lie gravely informed his listeners that this birding venture was no pleasure trip; that the errand was sacred; that each member of that crew has sloughed his land impurities, that from now till he returns he keep his actions pure, that is, transgress no birding law. Tho mind can see the supreme attention to the work in hand; can see the Hexing of the muscles and almost stationary stare ahead. Tho progress is slow; the paddles are "pushed" against a single tholepin, not "drawn" freehanded in tho Polynesian style —this alone showing the vast centuries of abcision from the parent stem. But the chosen time and tide and following seaswell help with spacious lifts along. The Arrival and a Fatality. They have arrived. Oil the lee or northeastern side of the rock are embayments in tho cliff-face, where the crafts can lie in shelter, and in calm weather be left moored to the rock, and should the arrival be too late to begin the killing and casting down, the tired mariners can sleep on shore. At. one such embayinent an arched tunnel pierces the rock; this by fato was chosen for a landing, but as the suction of the tunnel drew the craft toward its mouth, one of Waka's sons thrust his paddle at the rock to ward it off; the thrust missed its touch and man and paddle shot overside to bo sucked into tho tunnel and disappear ! At once tiie meanings of the omens stood revealed for admitting a stranger to the crew! • Now wero remembered the totem-shark's non-recognition of his patron lord! The seal also! But what of the penguin's direction to keep on ? What but to decoy them to destruction for infringing an important birding law ? They landed and mourned their dead. The father, to show that in this was seen the underhand of fate, by neither word nor mien reproached the culprit for this calamitous mischance. So they lifted ashore their food and water-bags and slept. But not the stranger. Fearing that the father to avenge his son might at the last moment force him to remain behind to perish, he determined to forestall this hap by "himself" escaping, and leaving "them" behind! So, when he heard their snore, lie crept down, unleashed the craft, and put out to sea! But how could he move the unwieldy craft to shore? This way:—To utilise the very tide, chosen by old Waka to take their bird- j laden argosy home again. All he had to do was to lay off and await that tide, and steer. Meeting a Difficulty. When, at break of day, the father woke, the stranger was gone! One glance to sea' explained how matters stood! In vain he beckoned the fugitive to return! Then the magnitude of their desertion opened the hell-gate of his wrath, and he shouted at tho fleeing wretch this curse: "Tchu ma' i Kon'-Tchuranga, roro tche polio on' tchimit'," etc. (You rocks at Turanga, rend the bowels of his children, etc. —meaning that as the children of the sons besido him would perish, so the rocks at Turanga should kill the father that they also perish of food.) Here, the narrator says, while the sons wailed the farewells chanted for the dead, the spirit of his ancestors entered the bowels of the father and inspired him what to do: " Up, sons, whi'e the water lasts. Go, cut off the wings of the birds close to the body and bring them here." All that day and the next they killed birds and cut off their wings. Then: " Pull the bones from the wings." The bones were pulled. " Plait the wings into a three-plait cable." They plaited it. " Knap one end of the wing-bones slantwise on a stone to point them." The wing-bones were knapped and pointed. Lav down a length of that cable two stretches long (12ft.). From there double it back and skewer the two plvs together with the pointed bones." Round and round the.y laid the cable and skewered each round to the other till they had a mat a stretch and a-half wide. " Now, lower it. to the water." They lowered it. It bore the three, by lying flat, without submerging to any depth. The weather being still propitious, the father and sons invoked tneir common totems to warn off sea monsters and at the towardland flowing tide laid themselves flat on their mat and set out on their 21-mile ■ voyage home. A Perilous Voyage. To comment on this anecdote as fiction is not difficult. To regard it as a fact accomplished is credible to such as can visualise what man' in extremis can and has achieved. I have crossed the distance in boat, steam and sail, and each time remembered how here Tama-mahi-waka s brave ancestors fought that tragic fight, for life. The currents race above a jagged sea bottom, so when the narrator relates that, due to the expansions and contractions caused by the upward bulgings and collapsing depressions on those tidal rips the skewers began to draw, and that to prevent a rending apart the two sons each with one hand gripped an outer margin of the mat, and With the other across it clasped his brother's hand, and so formed a human clamp to hold the thing together, and remembering the utter puerilities of their other folklore tales, .me sees in these details not inventions, but emanations from a central nucleus of truth. Yet despite these catastrophic tabulations —their two nights' toss from tide to tide, now permitting an approach to land, now swept back till a kindly easterly rose to lend a hand—they made shore at last, leaving us a record of resource, endurance and courage worthy of inscription among the hero deeds of man. And what of the fugitive? The narrator's voice quavers with pride as he recounts the puissance of his forbear's curse. How the potence of its magic decoyed him to cross that line of jags that jut out* from Turanga! How a woman in the dusk of morning, searching among the sea-wrack for kaeo (an edible zoophyte), seeing a bulge among the kelp, and thinking it a sleeping seal, took up a snag rj driftwood, and had it"in mid-air to crash it down, when the thing she saw was the whilom stranger's corpse!