of high standing in the Ngati-Ruanui tribe, and one of the Hauhaus' best fighting-leaders.
It was a wild scene that met the young soldier's gaze when he entered the stockade, and his heart sank before the savagely hostile gaze of a crowd of armed, half-stripped warriors, the black-bearded and shaggy-headed men of the bush, and their scarcely less savage-looking women.
A strange ceremony began.
In the centre of the village square or marae stood a rough-hewn pole or flagstaff, about fifteen feet high, on which flew one or two coloured flags. This was the Niu, the sacred staff which the Hauhau prophet Te Ua had commanded his followers to erect as a pole of worship in each of their villages. [The Niu was in more ancient times the name of a peculiar ceremony of divination often resorted to by the tohungas or priests; it is perhaps worth noting, too, that in the Islands of Polynesia, the traditional Maori Hawaiki, it is the general name for the coco-nut-tree.] All the inhabitants of the village—men, women, and children—formed up, and began to march round and round the Niu, with a priest in their midst, rushing frantically to and fro, and brandishing a Maori weapon as he yelled a ferocious-sounding chant. The people, too, lifted up their voices as they marched, and, after listening a while, Bent found to his astonishment that part of what they were chanting in a
