"I noticed," says the _pakeha_-Maori, "Timoti and Big Kereopa, each with a basket before them, enjoying the meal of human flesh. Timoti grabbed up his portion of meat from his basket, and ate it just as if he were eating a piece of bread." Then Titokowaru rose and, crying in a loud voice, ordered the people to burn the rest of the corpses, so that they should not defile the _marae_. The bundles of clothing from the dead lay on the _marae_. The Maoris gave Bent three pairs of soldiers' trousers, four shirts, and some boots. "I tell you I was pleased," says the old _pakeha_-Maori, who had no inconvenient scruples on the subject of dead men's clothes; "for a long time I had been wearing only Maori-made garments of flax." A great pile of wood was collected, heaped up six or seven feet high, and in the evening, as darkness fell, the bodies of the _pakehas_ were placed on this funeral pyre and cremated. The people squatted round--as they had sat at a similar ceremony in the "Bird's Beak" _pa_--and watched the flames devour their fallen foemen. And by the light of the great fire roaring away there on the _marae_, Titokowaru _taki_'d up and down, addressing his followers, and bounding and parading to and fro, his sacred feather-plumed _taiaha_ in his hand. He recited incantations, and chanted songs, and exhorted the Hauhaus, bidding them be of good heart and fight to the bitter end. Then Titokowaru turned to the body of the slain warrior Te Waka-tapa-ruru, lying on a blanket on the _marae_, with gun and tomahawk by his side. Gazing upon the silent, tattooed features of the dead _toa_, his comrade in many a wild foray and forest battle, he cried the old farewells to those whose spirits have passed to the _Reinga_, and he chanted this lament: "_Ki konei ra, e Waka e! Ka wehe koe i au. Ka riro i a koe I nuku-maniapoto, E ngakinga mate. Aue, e Waka e!_" ("There thou liest, O Waka! Parted from me for ever. Thou'rt borne away to the fields of night, In revenge for other deaths. Alas, O Waka!") And the wild _korero_ went on. _Tangi_ songs were chanted, and there were speeches of savage, boastful jubilation made--"great swelling words." But from a lone little thatched hut on one side of the crowded parade ground came a long-sustained crying sound, a sobbing heart-breaking dirge, rising and falling like a Highland coronach--a keening for the dead. Te Hau-karewa made lamentation for her slain warrior. CHAPTER XIX THE TAURANGA-IKA STOCKADE Another fighting _pa_ built--Scouting and skirmishing--The watcher on the tower--McDonnell and Titokowaru--How Trooper Lingard won the New Zealand Cross--Hairbreadth escapes--Pairama and the white man's leg.