The night was strangely, magically lovely. Massinger had no great desire to sleep. He felt, indeed, that one might easily watch till dawn amid this region of magic and sorcery. Brightly burned the stars in the dark blue heavens. There was no moon, but the constellations, to his excited fancy, seemed strangely lustrous and of intense, almost unreal, brilliancy. Warwick and he stood near their camp fire, only occasionally speaking, when all suddenly there arose a wild shout, then a succession of cries, from the direction of Te Heu Heu's _pah_, which pointed to some unusual occurrence. A wailing cry came, too, from the natives of their own encampment, whom they observed to have left their _whares_ and gathered in a group. "What is the meaning of all this?" said Massinger, who had been gazing over the lake, and listening to the low calls and whispering notes of the water-fowl which sailed in flocks amid its sedges and reeds. "What do they mean by that long-drawn sound? And now there is a shout--a sort of herald's proclamation." "You are right," said Warwick. "The Tohunga calls aloud, 'Behold the sacred fire on Tongariro! The Atua commands war. Listen, O men of the Arawa. "'The pakeha desires to take the country of the _nga iwi_ (the tribes). He will take the forests and the kumera plantations, the valleys and the mountains, the rivers and the shores of the sea. The Maori canoe will no longer be paddled on the broad bosom of the Waikato, on lakes which have been our fathers since they came from Hawaiki. The steamboat will drive away the Maori canoe; the sheep and cattle of the pakeha will feed on our plantations; the white magistrates will put our young men in prison; our old men will break stones for the pakeha roads. We shall all be slaves, working for a pakeha conqueror. "'Shall we be slaves, or shall we unite and march against the pakeha?'" A thousand voices shouted till the echoes by the lake shore rang again with cries as of one man-- "_Akore, akore, akore!_" "If we are not willing to be slaves, shall the tribes, the Waikato and the Ngatiawa, join together and drive the pakeha into the sea from whence he came?" Then one more deep-drawn shout of assent resounded through the still night-air. "You see what the feeling is," said Warwick, turning as he spoke. "Look yonder, and behold the fire on Tongariro!" Massinger swung round, and, to his great surprise, saw amidst a cloud of steam, high up on the mountain, a red band of fire, which seemed to encircle the upper portion of the cinder-cone which formed so remarkable an addition to the summit. A fresh volume of steam rose pillar-like from the crater, while from time to time angry bursts of flame issued from the top and sides of the cone. "A very grand sight," he said; "but what is there to create such a disturbance? It is surely not an unusual occurrence in this land of imprisoned fires? Is that the meaning of all this outcry?"