THE MYTHOLOGY OF THE EFATESE. 767 
The brothers, continually taunted with being adventurers, 
longed to get way to their mother’s country. One day they were 
shooting birds with arrows. An arrow went up into heaven and 
stuck fast in the roots of a namanga (banyan) tree. Another 
arrow sent after it stuck in the end of its shaft, and so on and so 
on, until the chain of arrows reached from heaven down to the 
brothers’ foreheads. They took hold of the nearest and pulled. 
It was firm. They climbed up to heaven. On getting up and 
climbing in over the roots of the banyan tree, they saw an old blind 
woman cooking six yams. They immediately thought, ‘“ Perhaps 
this is our grandmother of whom our mother used to tell us.” 
Being blind she counted the six yams by feeling them with her 
hands. They went forward without making any noise, and took 
one away. She again went over the yams, counting them, and 
could make outonly five. ‘“ Perhaps,” thought she, ‘“my grandsons, 
of whom my daughter told me, have come and taken the sixth.” 
Remembering thei names as they had been told to her, she called 
out, “MakaTafaki! Karisi Bum!” They immediately replied, ‘It’s 
we.” Thus ended their troubles. 
According to another version of this Efatese story, the mother of 
Maka Tafaki, and Karisi Bum, was called Taurere. Before leaving 
her home in the world on account of the ill-treatment to which 
she was subjected by her husband, she comforted her two 
sons, and told them not to cry but to watch for a long rope 
that should be let down from’ heaven till it reached the foot 
of a banyan tree. They kept on watching, till one day the 
rope appeared as their mother had said. One of them first 
climbed up far out of sight into heaven, and shook the rope as a 
signal to his brother below of his safe arrival. The other then 
climbed up also. They saw their old blind grandmother and 
addressed her as Lata! She, on her part, had been forewarned by 
her daughter of their coming, and being requested to entertain 
them kindly, giving them sugar-cane, flesh, and yams to eat. After 
eating they said to her, “ The skin of this sugar-cane is sharp for 
cutting. We will cut open your eyes with it that you may see.” 
This they did. She said, “Oh children, you have made me all 
right ; I am well.” When finally they resolved to go down again 
to the earth they made a big kawa (woven basket), and put into 
it all thingswe now see in theearth, as fowls, pigs, male and female, 
and all the different kinds of food, one by one. They let down 
this loaded ‘awa from heaven by means of a long rope. At the 
end of this rope it kept swinging in the air over every land 
(or all lands), but the mountains at none of them were high 
enough (so that it might touch them). They hauled it up, and 
finally lowered it down at Utanilangi, in a valley called Papalaha, 
between two high mountains, so that the mountains should over- 
hang the kawa and prevent it from swinging off into space. At 
