The Passing of the Old Maori.

There are Best's characteristic touches in another article, written when he was in camp at Te Whaiti, in the early part of his official sojourn there on the road works:

“One might run on for countless pages describing the customs and traditions of the Maori of old and his thoughts, wise and otherwise, of to-day. The old-time Maori is out of place in the era of the pakeha, and soon shall he be a memory of the past. His descendants will know but little of his doings and history, and that only which has been placed on record by the invading white man. Only the earthworks of his forts, where he fought the battles of his people, shall remain.

“The sullen waters of Whirinaki hurry onwards as of old through the grim Canon of Toi; the great forest of Tane still holds the lands of the ancient Marangaranga and of Potiki; the peaks of Otairi, Tawhiuau and Tuwhatawata are yet guarding the realm of Hine-ruarangi and her famous sire. Toi the Wood Eater. But no sign comes from them anent the history of the past. They have seen the rise and fall of many tribes; the coming and the going of races; the old, old struggle between Ruaimoko and the Fish of Maui; the birth, life and death of primitive man. Changeless as of yore are they, and hold their secret well.

“Across the moonlit valley the hill Umurakau looms black against the mother range, the palisades of the fighting sons of Pukeko, hewn laboriously out with some axes of a neolithic people, are white in the silver light; but below the ancient stronghold and lining the river bank, are the white tents of the Aitangaa-Tiki, and the unholy strains of the souldestroying concertina are making night hideous in the Vale of Toi. A few short decades back we might have heard the mournful chant of the watchman as he kept vigil in the pa above, the merriment of the whare tapere, or the resounding chorus of the war dance. But the old order ever changeth, and the ubiquitous Pakeha has come to stay.

“As old Tikitu of Ngati-Awa left me yesterday, he said—‘Friend! I see before me the day when the Maori shall be no more. That time is very near now; yet a little while and there shall be no more Maoris to trouble you. And it is because we, the Maori people of New Zealand, have lost the mana of our ancestors that we are disappearing so fast. There is no hope for us now, for that mana has gone from us for ever, and we shall pass away like the mao.'”

The Maori is not likely to become literally an “iwi ngaro,” a vanished tribe like the moa. But that mournful prophecy of the ancient man of NgatiAwa is already nearing its fulfilment. The primitive Maori is no more, and the last of the learned elders, the men and women who cling to the old ways, will soon be gathered to their Mother Earth again. The new generation, educated like the pakeha, its very language bastardized and debased by the inevitable hybrids, will have lost the mana tapu and the mana tangata of its fathers. It will have little interest in the traditions of the past. But some day it will fully appreciate the glamour and the wonder of the vanished heroic age, preserved in the notes so carefully and so copiously assembled from the lips of the bushmen and warriors, priests and poets, of the ancient race.