woman warned him not to look down when he was midway between heaven and earth, lest he should turn giddy and fall, and also to take care not to catch hold of a loose tendril. But just at that very moment he made a spring at the tendrils, and by mistake caught hold of a loose one, and away he swung to the very edge of the horizon, but a blast of wind blew forth from thence and drove him back to the other side of the skies, and then another gust swept him heavenwards, and again he was blown down. Just as he reached the ground this time Tawhaki shouted to him to let go, and lo, he stood upon the earth once more, and the two brothers wept over his narrow escape from destruction. Then Tawhaki began to climb, and he went up and up, repeating a powerful incantation as he climbed, till at last he reached the heavens, and there he found his wife and their daughter, and they took her to the water, and baptised her in proper New Zealand fashion. Lightning flashed from Tawhaki's armpits, and he still dwells up there in heaven, and when he walks, his footsteps make the thunder and lightning that are heard and seen on earth.[1]
There are other mythological ways besides the Heaven-tree, by which, in different parts of the world, it is possible to go up and down between the surface of the ground and the sky or the regions below; the rank spear-grass, a rope or thong, a spider's web, a ladder of iron or gold, a column of smoke, or the rainbow. It must be remembered in discussing such tales, that the idea of climbing, for instance, from earth to heaven by a tree, fantastic as it may seem to a civilized man of modern times, is in a different grade of culture quite a simple and natural idea, and too much stress must not be laid on bare coincidences to this
- ↑ Grey, 'Polynesian Mythology,' p. 66, etc. Several incidents are here omitted. In another version Tawhaki goes up not by the creeper but upon a spider's web. (Thomson, N. Z., vol. i. p. 111. Yate, p. 144.) Other stories connected with this series are to be found in the Samoan group. The taro, like the rice in Borneo, is brought down from heaven; there was a heaven-tree, where people went up and down, and when it fell it stretched some sixty miles; two young men went up to the moon, one by a tree, the other on the smoke of a fire as it towered into the sky (Turner, p. 246). In the Caroline Islands, another of these καπνοβάται goes up to heaven on a column of smoke to visit his celestial father (J. R. Forster, Obs. p. 606). In the Tonga Islands, Maui makes the toa grow up to heaven, so that the god Etumatubua can come down by it (Schirren, p. 76).
