This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
DESCENT INTO UNDER-WORLD.
343

other from North America, will serve to give an idea of the varieties of treatment of phases of sun-myth. The New Zealand myth of Maui, mixed as it may be with other fancies, is in its most striking features the story of Day and Night. The story of the Sun's birth from the ocean is thus told. There were five brothers, all called Maui, and it was the youngest Maui who had been thrown into the sea by Taranga his mother, and rescued by his ancestor Tama-nui-ki-te-Rangi, Great-Man-in-Heaven, who took him to his house, and hung him in the roof. Then is given in fanciful personality the tale of the vanishing of Night at dawn. One night, when Taranga came home, she found little Maui with his brothers, and when she knew her last-born, the child of her old age, she took him to sleep with her, as she had been used to take the other Mauis his brothers, before they were grown up. But the little Maui grew vexed and suspicious, when he found that every morning his mother rose at dawn and disappeared from the house in a moment, not to return till nightfall. So one night he crept out and stopped every crevice in the wooden window and the doorway, that the day might not shine into the house; then broke the faint light of early dawn, and then the sun rose and mounted into the heavens, but Taranga slept on, for she knew not it was broad day outside. At last she sprang up, pulled out the stopping of the chinks, and fled in dismay. Then Maui saw her plunge into a hole in the ground and disappear, and thus he found the deep cavern by which his mother went down below the earth as each night departed. After this, follows the episode of Maui's visit to his ancestress Muri-ranga-whenua, at that western Land's End where Maori souls descend into the subterranean region of the dead. She sniffs as he comes towards her, and distends herself to devour him, but when she has sniffed round from south by east to north, she smells his coming by the western breeze, and so knows that he is a descendant of hers. He asks for her wondrous jawbone, she gives it to him, and it is his weapon in his next exploit when he catches the sun, Tama-nui-te-Ra, Great-Man-Sun,