Page:Picturesque New Zealand, 1913.djvu/463

 town sixty-five miles south of Auckland, opposite to which the Maori sovereign dwelt. Crossing the Waikato River in a rowboat, and walking up its left bank three quarters of a mile, I reached the outskirts of Mahuta's capital. It looked like a village in a cornfield. Half encircling it were little patches of ripened maize, and high in willow trees that lined the river bank hung bunches of husked yellow corn. Near the corn sweet potatoes grew and pumpkins yellowed.

On a near approach no imposing architecture such as befits the resident city of a king was revealed. In what might well be termed a suburb of the village stood a Mormon church, the only European church in sight. Close at hand were small houses of wood and of wood and tree-fern trunks combined. Some of these huts brushed sides with large galvanized-iron chimneys; all were humble. Within the pa proper a tall, unpainted flagstaff cast a crooked shadow on a long carved meeting-house, which had on the apex of its front gable boards a wooden effigy with protruding tongue. Nearer the road stood a longer one-story building used as an eating-house at large meetings.

I looked for the village gate. I had thought I should find a carved door, perhaps with a wooden Colossus of ferocious mien bestride it. Instead I saw only a barbed-wire fence, which my eyes followed until they encountered a gap, such as one sees on a farm when bars are down. This was the village entrance. There was no barrier of any kind, nor any ornamentation.