Yet once upon a time there was going and coming between earth and the place of darkness, as the legend of the origin of the later style of tattooing shows.  Thus the story runs.  The hero Mata-ora had to wife the beautiful Niwa Reka.  One day for some slight cause he struck her, and, leaving him in anger, she fled to her father, who dwelt in the Underworld.  Thither followed the repentant Mata-ora.  On his way he asked the fan-tail bird whether it had seen a human being pass.  Yes, a woman had gone by downcast and sobbing.  Holding on his way, Mata-ora met his father-in-law, who, looking in his face, complained that he was badly tattooed.  Passing his hand over Mata-ora’s face he wiped out with his divine power the blue lines there, and then had him thrown down on the ground and tattooed in a novel, more artistic and exquisitely agonizing fashion.  Mata-ora in his pain chanted a song calling upon his wife’s name.  Report of this was carried to Niwa Reka, and her heart was touched.  She forgave her husband, and nursed him through the fever caused by the tattooing.  Happier than Orpheus and Eurydice, the pair returned to earth and taught men to copy the patterns punctured on Mata-ora’s face.  But, alas! in their joy they forgot to pay to Ku Whata Whata, the mysterious janitor of Hades, Niwa Reka’s cloak as fee.  So a message was sent up to them that henceforth no man should be permitted to return to earth from the place of darkness.  In the age of the heroes not only the realms below but the realms above could be reached by the daring.  Hear the tale of Tawhaki, the Maori Endymion!  When young he became famous by many feats, among others, by destroying the submarine stronghold of a race of sea-folk who had carried off his mother.  Into their abode he let a flood of sunshine, and they, being children of the darkness, withered and died in the light.  The fame of Tawhaki rose to the skies, and one of the daughters of heaven stole down to behold him at night, vanishing away at dawn.  At last the celestial one became his wife.  But he was not pleased with the daughter she bore him and, wounded by his words, she withdrew with her child to the skies.  Tawhaki in his grief remembered that she had told him the road thither.  He must find a certain tendril of a wild vine which, hanging down from the sky to earth, had become rooted in the ground.  Therefore with his brother the hero set out on the quest, and duly found the creeper.  But there were two tendrils.  The brother seized the wrong one; it was loose, and he was swung away, whirled by the wind backwards and forwards from one horizon to the other.  Tawhaki took the right ladder, and climbed successfully.[1] At the top he met with adventures, and had even to become a slave, and carry axes and firewood disguised as a little, ugly, old man.  At last, however, he regained his wife, became a god, and still reigns above.  It is he who causes lightning to flash from heaven.

[Footnote 1:  Another version describes his ladder as a thread from a spider’s web; a third as the string of his kite, which he flew so skilfully that it mounted to the sky; then Tawhaki, climbing up the cord, disappeared in the blue vault.]