close to the land, the older Maori people say they can hear Te Reo Irirangi, a peculiar high singing, just on the edge of silence. This singing signifies the passing of the spirits. Sometimes the spirits are chattering and laughing too. Only certain people can hear this, but they swear by it, and they include several whose judgment I would not question in other, more mundane matters. The ancient people of this land were all of them aware of the spirits passing, and in this part of the island at least—even constructed their food-houses accordingly, with the entrance always facing the north, lest the tapu spirit be trapped, contaminating the food, with possibly fatal results. Such things had been known.

HAUMU, HILL OF SPIRITS On my second trip to Te Reinga, I followed the way of the spirits, the original road taken by the Rev. W. G. Puckey and his guide Te Paerata, in the early December of 1834. I knew Puckey's journal well, thanks to the kindness of his descendants, the Puckeys of Kaitaia. He came up the Ninety-Mile Beach, as I did, and climbed the hill called Haumu at the head of the beach, where the spirits from the two coasts and the centre of the island are said to mingle. Here Puckey records—and explains— the first simple phenomenon. There we saw many dry waka au, which, as a native whom we took as a guide from our last place said, were the tokens of the spirits who have rested at this place. I asked him if it were not possible for strangers who passed this way to do as my natives were then doing, which was everyone twisting green branches and depositing them there as a sign that they had stopped at that notable place. This is a general custom with the natives whenever they pass any remarkable place I was looking for these braided leaves. Only a few days before, Louis Hobson, the young Maori secretary of the Tai Tokerau Trust Board had been telling me of a pohutukawa, where the dried emblems lay, some made of leaves not usually found near the coast, but I saw no sign of them. Possibly I did not look in the right place.

MARINGAROA, HILL OF FAREWELL But Hohepa Kanara had mentioned a peculiar braiding of the grass, and I found this, not on Haumu, but on the next hill, Maringinoa, where some freak of the wind had apparently twisted and knotted the marram-grass, binding the heads so tightly they could not uncoil. Puckey does not mention Maringinoa at all, but states that the spirits paused and wept on Haumu, as they gazed for the last time back the way they had come. It is from Maringinoa, not Haumu, that one has the last view of Ninety-Mile Beach and the sweep of country southward. The very name Maringinoa comes from the weeping of the spirits. “Maringinoa,” said Hohepa Kanara, “is where the spirits farewelled their people,” and I am inclined to accept his statement. Puckey abbreviated his account, and it was written apparently some time after his journey to Cape Reinga. His account goes almost direct from Haumu to the high point overlooking the aka, the root by which the spirits descended into the ocean. “After Maringinoa,” said Hohepa Kanara, “the spirits descend into the valley of Waingurunguru. In that valley you can hear the water tangiing for the dead.” I thought, at the time, that he was referring possibly to a waterfall or some such thing; but below Maringinoa is a valley, very still and swampy, where a stream flows sluggishly, if at all, and although it was the wrong time of the year for most insects, at the water's edge I could hear faint droning, coming from everywhere and nowhere. Thus was Waingurunguru, murmuring-waters. It was more an eerie quivering of the air than an actual sound, and it persisted for the length of the stream.