348 GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION OF MYTHS. 



wife and child. At last tlie brothers came to the spot where 

 the ends of the tendrils which hung down from heaven reached 

 the earth, and there they found an old ancestress of theirs, 

 whose name was Matakerepo. She was appointed to take 

 care of the tendrils, and she sat at the place where they touched 

 the earth and held the ends of one of them in her hands. So 

 next day the younger brother, Karihi, started to climb up, and 

 the old 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 ten- 

 dril. 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 baptized her in proper New Zealand fashion. Light- 

 ning 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.^ 



There are other mythological ways beside the Heaven-tree, 

 by which, in difierent parts of the world, it is possible to go 



* Grey, ' Polynesian Mytliology,' p. 66, etc. Several incidents are liere omitted. 

 In another version Tawhaki goes up not hy the creeper but upon a spider's web. 

 (Thomson, N. Z., vol. i. p. 111. Tate, p. 144.) Other stories connected with this 

 series are to be found in the Samoan groujj. The taro, like the rice m 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 wp 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 Ka-Kvo^arai goes up to 

 heaven on a column of smoke to visit his celestial father (J. E. 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). 



