As soon as it was light enough to see, Kepa, with his Wanganuis, accompanied by a party of us white men, started in pursuit, but we found before we had proceeded far the Hau Haus had broken up and dispersed. We, however, succeeded in killing a few men, who had taken refuge up trees, and also captured three women, who, on being brought into camp, declared that Titokowaru had fled to Te Ngaihere, a historical stronghold that in ancient days had been looked upon as the last refuge of his tribe. By doing so he had lost the last remnant of his prestige, so that the haughty savage who had proclaimed only two months previously he was going to drive the white men into the sea was now a fugitive, abandoned by his allies, laughed at by his enemies, and with but few followers on whom he could rely. But now the question arose: Where was this fabled Te Ngaihere? No one seemed to know its locality or what it was like. Everyone seemed to have heard traditions about it, but no one had ever set eyes on it. It was a place tapu, not to be talked about, much less to be visited, and whether it were a mountain, a bush, a lake or a cave, no one could give us a single pointer. However, if a place be worth finding it is worth prospecting for, so away went Kepa to scour the country one way, while myself with my usual followers took another direction. It was a big order, as I think you will allow, my gentle readers, to plunge into a trackless country and look for something not knowing what the deuce it was you were hunting for. Troth, for my own part, I consider that prospecting for the Holy Grail was a dry billet alongside the one I had shipped for. Kepa was the lucky man to solve the problem, Te Ngaihere turning out to be a big island situated in the centre of a quaking swamp. In olden days this swamp had evidently been much deeper, but it still looked quite impassable for anything but a snipe, and both Kepa and Whitmore deemed it to be so, the distance from the mainland to the island being quite four hundred yards.