Indeed, on dim and foggy days, and when the wet vapours becloud the long-dead volcano land, it is not difficult…
- Date of account
- Published 1923
- Source
- Maori folk-tales of the Port Hills, Canterbury, New Zealand
- Reference
- Maori folk-tales of the Port Hills, Canterbury, New Zealand · selected passage 20
- Rights
- public_domain
- Language
- English
- Record updated
- 2026-08-25
Record summary
Indeed, on dim and foggy days, and when the wet vapours becloud the long-dead volcano land, it is not difficult to enter into the spirit of the Maori fancy, and in imagination people all these craggy pinnacles with the Patu-paiarehe, and the wooded gulches with Maeroero, the wild men of the bush
Published source text
Read the available text below. Archive transcriptions may contain OCR errors; later context is labelled separately. A recorded claim is not a finding that it happened.
Source passage
Source text · mention onlyIndeed, on dim and foggy days, and when the wet vapours becloud the long-dead volcano land, it is not difficult to enter into the spirit of the Maori fancy, and in imagination people all these craggy pinnacles with the _Patu-paiarehe_, and the wooded gulches with _Maeroero_, the wild men of the bush. When the mists steal down on the rhyolite knobs of the fire-fused Port Hills and the Peninsula, craggy beyond description, peaked in a hundred fantastic shapes, with great black and grey nipples of lava protruding from the grassy slopes and the woody ridges, the land has an eerie look, fit playground for the Forgetful People, as the old Irish would have called them. In the early morning too, when the fogs are lifting from the bays, and here and there a black broken thumb of a peak juts out above the trailing vapours, or the mist-wreaths drape in torn veilings the huge rampart-like scarps, and when the first rosy sunbeams glorify the half-revealed mountains, the poetic mind can well conceive of this region as one of fairy wizardry and all manner of dusk-time magic.
Historical context
Contextual commentary · mention onlyThis material belongs to a folklore tradition. Story type, collector, community, transmission and literary editing matter when comparing it with other sources.
Modern context
Contextual commentary · mention onlyLattice compares motifs and reported features without assuming that a traditional being is a biological species or that similar stories document one external cause.
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