170 
TAPU. 
innocently placed it under the eaves of his house, to catch 
water ; the rain coming from a sacred dwelling, rendered the 
utensil so likewise ; it was afterwards removed by a person 
to cook with, without her knowing what had been done ; 
when she was told it had caught water from the roof, she 
exclaimed, We shall all die before night; they went, how- 
ever, to the tohunga, who made it noa again by uttering 
the Tupeke over it, and so averted the evil.* 
Sickness also made the person tapu ; all diseases were sup- 
posed to be occasioned by atuas entering the body of the 
afflicted; these, therefore, rendered the person sacred. The 
sick were removed from their own houses, and had sheds built 
for them in the bush, at a considerable distance from the pa, 
where they lived apart ; if any remained in their houses and 
died there, they became tapu, were painted over with red 
ochre, and could not again be used, which often put a tribe to 
great inconvenience, as some houses were the common abode 
of perhaps thirty or forty per sons, f The wife of a chief was 
very ill, I therefore took her into my little hospital, where 
she laid for several days ; at last, her husband came and 
carried her away, saying he was afraid of her dying there, 
lest the house should be made tapu and thus hinder me 
from using it again. During the war, Maketu, a principal 
chief of the hostile natives, was shot in a house belonging 
to a settler, which he was then plundering ; from that time 
it became tapu, and no heathen would enter it for years. 
The resting places of great chiefs on a journey became 
tapu ; if they were in the forest, the spots were cleared, and 
surrounded with a fence of basket work, and names were 
* The following is a Tupeke : 
A ko te puru, ko te puru, koa, The dancing, the dancing of the legs, 
the striving the striving, that anger 
may be done away, 
the anger cannot reach, 
lest the stomach be pierced 
stand firm like the comorant 
and anger departs . — Maori Gazette. 
a tohe tohe ki aue ue 
kia tu tanga tangai te riri 
e kore te riri e tae mai 
ki kai wara kopu 
Kawautia ko ahaaha te riri 
f This, perhaps, may be the excuse of those heathen natives, who expose 
and abandon their sick ; it is also something like the law of the leper. 
