The well-known principle that there is no potent, respected, and lasting institution, however strange, but has its roots in practical usefulness, is amply verified in the case of tapu.  By it authority was ensured, dignity hedged about with respect, and property and public health protected.  Any person, place or thing laid under tapu might not be touched, and sometimes not even approached.  A betrothed maiden defended by tapu was as sacred as a vestal virgin of Rome; a shrine became a Holy Place; the head of a chief something which it was sacrilege to lay hands on.  The back of a man of noble birth could not be degraded by bearing burdens—­an awkward prohibition in moments when no slave or woman happened to be in attendance on these lordly beings.  Anything cooked for a chief was forbidden food to an inferior.  The author of Old New Zealand tells of an unlucky slave who unwittingly ate the remains of a chiefs dinner.  When the knowledge of this frightful crime was flashed upon him, he was seized with internal cramps and pains and, though a strong man, died in a few hours.  The weapons and personal effects of a chief were, of course, sacred even in the opinion of a thief, but tapu went further.  Even the fire a chief had lit might not be used by commoners.  As for priests, after the performance of certain ceremonies they for a time had perforce to become too sacred to feed themselves with their hands.  Food would be laid down before them and kneeling, or on all-fours like dogs, they had to pick it up with their teeth.  Perhaps their lot might be so far mitigated that a maiden would be permitted to convey food to their mouths on the end of a fern-stalk—­a much less disagreeable process for the eater.  Growing fields of the sweet potato were sacred for obvious reasons, as were those who were working therein.  So were burial-places and the bones of the dead.  The author above-mentioned chancing one day on a journey to pick up a human skull which had been left exposed by a land-slide, immediately became an outcast shunned by acquaintances, friends and his own household, as though he were a very leper.  Before he could be officially cleansed and readmitted into decent Maori society, his clothing and furniture had to be destroyed, and his kitchen abandoned.  By such means did this—­to us—­ridiculous superstition secure reverence for the dead and some avoidance of infection.  To this end the professional grave-digger and corpse-bearer of a Maori village was tapu, and lived loathed and utterly apart.  Sick persons were often treated in the same way, and inasmuch as the unlucky might be supposed to have offended the gods, the victims of sudden and striking misfortune were treated as law-breakers and subjected to the punishment of Muru described in the last chapter.

Death in Maori eyes was not the Great Leveller, as with us.  Just as the destiny of the chief’s soul was different from that of the commoner or slave, so was the treatment of his body.