ss, withered and died
in the light. The fame of Tawhaki rose to the skies, and one of the
daughters of heaven stole down to behold him at night, vanishing away
at dawn. At last the celestial one became his wife. But he was not
pleased with the daughter she bore him and, wounded by his words, she
withdrew with her child to the skies. Tawhaki in his grief remembered
that she had told him the road thither. He must find a certain tendril
of a wild vine which, hanging down from the sky to earth, had become
rooted in the ground. Therefore with his brother the hero set out on
the quest, and duly found the creeper. But there were two tendrils.
The brother seized the wrong one; it was loose, and he was swung away,
whirled by the wind backwards and forwards from one horizon to the
other. Tawhaki took the right ladder, and climbed successfully.[1] At
the top he met with adventures, and had even to become a slave, and
carry axes and firewood disguised as a little, ugly, old man. At last,
however, he regained his wife, became a god, and still reigns above.
It is he who causes lightning to flash from heaven.

[Footnote 1: Another version describes his ladder as a thread from
a spider's web; a third as the string of his kite, which he flew so
skilfully that it mounted to the sky; then Tawhaki, climbing up the
cord, disappeared in the blue vault.]

The man in the moon becomes, in Maori legend, a woman, one Rona by
name. This lady, it seems, once had occasion to go by night for water
to a stream. In her hand she carried an empty calabash. Stumbling in
the dark over stones and the roots of trees she hurt her shoeless feet
and began to abuse the moon, then hidden behind clouds, hurling at
it some such epithet as "You old tattooed face, there!" But the
moon-goddess heard, and reaching down caught up the insulting Rona,
calabash and all, into the sky. In vain the frightened woman clutched,
as she rose, the tops of a ngaio-tree. The roots gave way, and Rona
with her calabash and her tree are placed in the front of the moon for
ever, an awful warning to all who are tempted to mock at divinities in
their haste.

All beings, gods, heroes and men, are sprung from the ancient union of
Heaven and Earth, Rangi and Papa. Rangi was the father and Earth the
great mother of all. Even now, in these days, the rain, the snow, the
dew and the clouds are the creative powers which come down from Rangi
to mother Earth and cause the trees, the shrubs and th