Colour Scheme by Ngaio Marsh Page B

ago,” said Gaunt, “you dangled this place before me like some atrocious bait. Now you do nothing but bemoan its miseries. You are strangely inconsistent.”
    “In the interval,” said Dikon, wrenching the car out of a pothole, and changing down, “I have seen the place. I implore you to remember, sir, that you have been warned.”
    “You overdid it. You painted it in macabre colours. My curiosity was stimulated. For pity’s sake, my dear Dikon, drive a little further away from the edge of the abyss. Can this mountain goat-track possibly be a main road?”
    “It’s the only road from Harpoon to Wai-ata-tapu, sir. You wanted somewhere quiet, you know. And these are not mountains. There are no mountains in the Northland. The big stuff is in the South.”
    “I’m afraid you’re a scenic snob. To me this is a mountain. When I fall over the edge of this precipice, I shall not be found with a sneer on my lips because the drop was merely five hundred feet instead of a thousand. There’s a most unpleasant smell about this place.”
    “It’s the thermal smell. People are said to get to like it.”
    “Nonsense. How are you travelling, Colly?”
    Fenced in by luggage in the back seat, Colly replied that he kept his eyes closed at the curves. “I didn’t seem to notice it so much this morning in them forests,” he added. “It’s dynamite in the open.”
    The road corkscrewed its way in and out of a gully and along a barren stretch of downland. On its left the coast ran freely northwards in a chain of scrolls, last interruptions in its firm line before it tightened into the Ninety Mile Beach. The thunder of the Tasman Sea hung like a vast rumour on the freshening air, and above the margin of the downs Rangi’s Peak was slowly erected.
    “That’s an ominous-looking affair,” said Gaunt. “What is it about these hills that gives them an air of the fabulous? They are not so very odd in shape, not incredible like the Dolomites or imposing like the Rockies — not, as you point out in your superior way, Dikon, really mountains at all. Yet they seem to be pregnant with some tiresome secret. What is it?”
    “Perhaps it’s something to do with the volcanic silhouette. If there’s a secret the answer’s in the Maori language. I’m afraid you’ll get very tired of that cone, sir. It looks over the hills round the Springs.” Dikon waited for a moment. Gaunt had a trick of showing a fugitive interest in places, of asking for expositions, and of growing restless when they were given to him.
    “Why is the answer in Maori?” he said.
    “It was a native burial-ground in the old days. They tipped the bodies into the crater. It’s extinct you know. Supposed to be full of them.”
    “Good Lord!” said Gaunt softly.
    The car climbed higher, and the base of Rangi’s Peak, a series of broad platforms and slopes, came into sight. “You can see quite clearly,” Dikon said, “the route they must have followed. Miss Claire tells me the tribes used to camp at the foot for three days holding a
tangi
, the Maori equivalent of a wake. Then the body was carried up the Peak by relays of bearers. They said that if it was a chief who had died, and if the air was still, you could hear the singing as far away as Wai-ata-tapu.”
    “Gawd!” said Colly.
    “Can you look into the crater and see…?”
    “I don’t know. It’s a native reserve, the Claires told me. Very tapu of course.”
    “What’s that?”
    “Tapu? Taboo. Sacred. Forbidden. Untouchable. I don’t suppose the Maori people ever climb up the Peak nowadays. No admittance to the
Pakeha
, of course; it would be much too tempting a hunting-ground. They used to bury the chiefs’ weapons with them. There is a certain adze inherited by the chief Rewi who died about a hundred years ago and was buried on the Peak. This adze, his favourite weapon, was hidden up there. It had featured prominently and bloodily in the Maori wars, and had been spoken of in their oral schools