Page:Adventures of Kimble Bent.djvu/259

Rh the people gathered round the fires on the marae or in the big sleeping wharés, cand talked and sang and danced the hakas of which they never wearied. Wild night-scenes those on the stockaded marae, with the crowds of blanketed or flax-cloaked men and women, their wild faces illumined by the leaping flames, squatting in great circles round the camp fires, while more than half nude figures leaped and stamped and slapped their limbs and chests with resounding slaps, and expelled the air from their lungs in wolfish "Ooh's!" and "Hau's!" as they trod the assembly ground in all the fury of the war-dance. A warrior orator would rise, weapon in hand, and throwing off his blanket for freedom of action, go bounding along the marae in front of the assemblage, shouting short, sharp sentences as he taki'd to and fro, his athletic figure untrammelled except for a waist-shawl or short dangling mat, fire in his movements, and ferocity in every gesture and in every cry—the embodiment of belligerent Maoridom in its savage prime.

Like defiant replying shouts from some hidden foe in the blackness of the forest that rose in a solid wall above the rear stockade came the clear echoes of the roaring haka choruses.

And so the wild night passed, until the camp fires died down, and the tribespeople sought sleep in their packed wharepunis and their rush-strewn burrows; and the melancholy "Kou-kou!" of the