EGMONT’S MYSTERY.

Taranaki Daily News, 18 June 1925, Page 11

EGMONT’S MYSTERY.

A CAVE IN THE MOUNTAIN. REPOSITORY OiF DEAD MAORIS. Writes W. K. Howitt in the Auckland Star:—A numoer of us boys went with a party of settlers up t'he slopes of Egmont one winter’s day searching for wild cattle, to provide provender for the remainder of the winter months. As we trudged along through the bush, getting >ur lungs filled with ozone from oil’ the mountain slopes, we came to a cave where the natives had for many years, perhaps centuries, buried their honoured dead. Our elders knew the place was “tapu,” and keen though they were to go in and see the cave, they respected the Maori laws, and all the years since I have never heard that the old burial place was ever violated, if other eyes had seen its existence. At the time 1 speak of there was no natives near the place, but if they had come about and seen any white person go into the cave, it would have meant a feud and perhaps bloodshed; if not immediately, at some future time.

The mysteries of old Egmont have not yet all been solved, and this is easy, to understand, for in her giant recesses the old Maoris performed many of their sacred rites, and almost treated her like a god. Who knows but in the ancient days, a thousand years or so ago, for we know that the old navigators from Hawaiki were here so tong ago as that, Egmont may occasionally have emitted black clouds of smoke from off her symmetrical peak, and may have sometimes belched forth lurid flame, which not only spoke to the Maori of an “atua” but spoke of the “atua” itself, through tongues of fire. The ancient Maori was not a sordid groundling; he had great spiritual attributes, and the very existence of the tribes with their tohungas and then- priests showed that they ’fed their minds with food such as the soul is fed on. With the Maori there was a higher self.