There where the roof had fallen, it roared like the
mouth of hell.
Thither Rahero went, stumbling on senseless folk,
And grappled a post of the house, and began to climb
in the smoke:
The last alive of Vaiau; and the son borne by the
sire.
The post glowed in the grain with ulcers of eating
fire,
And the fire bit to the blood and mangled his hands
and thighs;
And the fumes sang in his head like wine and stung
in his eyes;
And still he climbed, and came to the top, the place
of proof,
And thrust a hand through the flame, and clambered
alive on the roof.
But even as he did so, the wind, in a garment of flames
and pain,
Wrapped him from head to heel; and the waistcloth
parted in twain;
And the living fruit of his loins dropped in the fire
below.
About the blazing feast-house clustered the eyes of
the foe,
Watching, hand upon weapon, lest ever a soul should
flee,
Shading the brow from the glare, straining the neck
to see
Only, to leeward, the flames in the wind swept far
and wide,
And the forest sputtered on fire; and there might
no man abide.
Thither Rahero crept, and dropped from the burning
eaves,
And crouching low to the ground, in a treble covert
of leaves
And fire and volleying smoke, ran for the life of
his soul
Unseen; and behind him under a furnace of ardent coal,
Cairned with a wonder of flame, and blotting the night
with smoke,
Blazed and were smelted together the bones of all
his folk.
He fled unguided at first; but hearing the breakers
roar,
Thitherward shaped his way, and came at length to
the shore.
Sound-limbed he was: dry-eyed; but smarted in
every part;
And the mighty cage of his ribs heaved on his straining
heart
With sorrow and rage. And “Fools!”
he cried, “fools of Vaiau,
Heads of swine—gluttons—Alas!
and where are they now?
Those that I played with, those that nursed me, those
that I nursed?
God, and I outliving them! I, the least and
the worst —
I, that thought myself crafty, snared by this herd
of swine,
In the tortures of hell and desolate, stripped of
all that was mine:
All!—my friends and my fathers—the
silver heads of yore
That trooped to the council, the children that ran
to the open door
Crying with innocent voices and clasping a father’s
knees!
And mine, my wife—my daughter—my
sturdy climber of trees
Ah, never to climb again!”
Thus in the dusk of the night,
(For clouds rolled in the sky and the moon was swallowed
from sight,)
Pacing and gnawing his fists, Rahero raged by the
shore.
Vengeance: that must be his. But much
was to do before;
And first a single life to be snatched from a deadly
place,
A life, the root of revenge, surviving plant of the
race:
And next the race to be raised anew, and the lands
of the clan
Repeopled. So Rahero designed, a prudent man
Even in wrath, and turned for the means of revenge
and escape:
A boat to be seized by stealth, a wife to be taken
by rape.