A slave’s death was proverbially that of a dog, no man regarded it.  Even the ordinary free man was simply buried in the ground in a sitting posture and forgotten.  But the departure of a chief of rank and fame, of great mana or prestige, was the signal for national mourning.  With wreaths of green leaves on their heads, friends sat round the body wailing the long-drawn cry, Aue!  Aue! or listening to some funeral chant recited in his praise.  Women cut themselves with sharp sea-shells or flakes of volcanic glass till the blood ran down.  The corpse sat in state adorned with flowers and red ochre and clad in the finest of mantles.  Albatross feathers were in the warrior’s hair, his weapons were laid beside him.  The onlookers joined in the lamenting, and shed actual tears—­a feat any well-bred Maori could perform at will.  Probably a huge banquet took place; then it was held to be a truly great tangi.  Often the wives of the departed killed themselves in their grief, or a slave was sacrificed in his honour.  His soul was believed to mount aloft, and perhaps some star was henceforth pointed out as his eye shining down and watching over his tribe.  The tattooed head of the dead man was usually reverently preserved—­stored away in some secret recess and brought out by the priest to be gazed upon on high occasions.  The body, placed in a canoe-shaped coffin, was left for a time to dry on a stage or moulder in a hollow tree.  After an appointed period the bones were scraped clean and laid away in a cavern or cleft known only to a sacred few.  They might be thrown down some dark mountain abyss or torere.  Such inaccessible resting-places of famous chiefs—­deep well-like pits or tree-fringed chasms—­are still pointed out to the traveller who climbs certain New Zealand summits.  But, wherever the warrior’s bones were laid, they were guarded by secrecy, by the dreaded tapu, and by the jealous zeal of his people.  Even now no Maori tribe will sell such spots, and the greedy or inquisitive Pakeha who profanely explores or meddles with them does so at no small risk.

Far different was the fate of those unlucky leaders who fell in battle, or were captured and slaughtered and devoured thereafter.  Their heads stuck upon the posts of the victor’s pa were targets for ribaldry, or, in later days, might be sold to the Pakeha and carried away to be stared at as oddities.  Their bones might be used for flutes and fishing-hooks, for no fisherman was so lucky as he whose hook was thus made; their souls were doomed to successive stages of deepening darkness below, and at length, after reaching the lowest gulf, passed as earth-worms to annihilation.

[Illustration]

Chapter IV

THE NAVIGATORS

  “A ship is floating on the harbour now,
  A wind is hovering o’er the mountain’s brow. 
  There is a path on the sea’s azure floor,
  No keel hath ever ploughed that path before.”