Vengeance, however, fell upon the conspirators.  A sixth brother had had nothing to do with their plot.  This was Tawhiri-Matea, the god of winds and storms.  He loyally accompanied his father to the realms above, whence he descended on his rebel brothers in furious tempests.  The sea-god fled to the ocean, where he and his children dwell as fishes.  The two gods of plant-food hid in the Earth, and she, forgiving mother that she was, sheltered them in her breast.  Only Tu, the god of mankind, stayed erect and undaunted.  So it is that the winds and storms make war to this day upon men, wrecking their canoes, tearing down their houses and fences and ruining all their handiwork.  Not only does man hold out against these attacks, but, in revenge for the cowardly desertion of Tu by his weaker brethren, men, his people, prey upon the fish and upon the plants that give food whether wild or cultivated.

Space will scarcely permit even a reference to other Maori myths—­to the tale, for instance, of the great flood which came in answer to the prayers of two faithful priests as punishment for the unbelief, the discords and the wickedness of mankind; then all were drowned save a little handful of men and women who floated about on a raft for eight moons and so reached Hawaiki.  Of the creation of man suffice it to say that he was made by Tiki, who formed him out of red clay, or, as some say, out of clay reddened by his own blood.  Woman’s origin was more ethereal and poetic; her sire was a noonday sunbeam, her mother a sylvan echo.  Many are the legends of the hero, Maui.  He lassooed the sun with ropes and beat him till he had to go slower, and so the day grew longer.  The first ropes thus used were of flax, which burned and snapped in the sun’s heat.  Then Maui twisted a cord of the tresses of his sister, Ina, and this stayed unconsumed.  It was Maui who went to fetch for man’s use the fire which streamed from the finger-nails of the fire goddess, and who fished up the North Island of New Zealand, still called by the Maoris Te Ika a Maui, the fish of Maui.  He first taught tattooing and the art of catching fish with bait, and died in the endeavour to gain immortality for men.  Death would have been done away with had Maui successfully accomplished the feat of creeping through the body of a certain gigantic goddess.  But that flippant and restless little bird, the fan-tail, was so tickled at the sight of the hero crawling down the monster’s throat that it tittered and burst into laughter.  So the goblin awoke, and Maui died for man in vain.

Such are some of the sacred myths of the Maori.  They vary very greatly in different tribes and are loaded with masses of detail largely genealogical.  The religious myths form but one portion of an immense body of traditional lore, made up of songs and chants, genealogies, tribal histories, fables, fairy-tales and romantic stories.  Utterly ignorant as the Maoris were of any kind of writing or picture-drawing,