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When the enemy departed, the agonised father came down from his retreat and found lying in the hut the mangled corpse of his little girl. He carried it to Mr. Brown at Matamata, with the words, "My heart is sad, for I do not know whether my child has gone to heaven or to the Reinga."
Reinga signifies, properly, the place of flight; and is said, in some of the accounts, to be a rock or a mountain at the North Cape from which, according to others, the spirits descend into the next world through the sea.
The slaves that are sacrificed upon the death of a chief, by his friends, are generally intended to prevent him from coming again to destroy them; but we find that on the occasion of a child having been drowned, the mother insisted upon a female slave being killed, to be a companion for it on its way to the Reinga.
Very pathetic was the fear expressed by the older Maoris lest the white man should cut away this frail support of their hope of a future life: "Let the young men go with you to your heaven, but leave us our ladder to the Reinga."
It lay amidst rivers and hills, and its position was such that the roar of the surf on both eastern and western coasts of the island could be distinctly heard. Shortly after his permanent settlement, Mr. Puckey made a journey to the extreme north of the island and reached Cape Reinga.
Ancient of days was Rehua, with streaming hair. The lightning flashed from his arm-pits, great was his power, and to him the sick, the blind, and the sorrowful might pray. It was not the upper world of Ao or Light, but an under world of Po or Darkness, to which the spirit of the unprivileged Maori must take its way. Nor was the descent to Te Reinga or Hades a facilis descensus Averni.
All that was is gone; and the land of the Maori is no longer theirs. God has called to the Maori people, and they go. The souls of our dead crowd the path that leads to the Reinga. "Lo! the Pakeha men are very many. It is good that they should see our maidens, and it is good that they should marry them. Then there will be children that shall live, and a new race of Maori blood.
But there exists a great deal of Maori tradition connected with various spots, and some of us do the best we can to preserve the tales that adorn certain localities. Some of the legends are mythological. Of such sort is that which gives such vivid interest to lonely Cape Reinga; the place where the spirits of dead Maori take their plunge into the sea, on their way from earth to the next world.
But they hold also, it would seem, that there is a separate immortality for each of the eyes of the dead person; the left, as before-mentioned, ascending to heaven and becoming a star, and the other, in the shape of a spirit, taking flight for the Reinga.
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