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TCP Press
20200 Marsh Hill Road
Uxbridge, Ontario
L9P 1R3 Canada
(905) 852-3777
www.tcppress.com
Copyright © 2023, 2021 Joe Brewer
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or
transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or
other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of
the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews
and certain other noncommercial/educational uses permitted by copyright law.
For permission requests, contact the publisher.
Special discounts are available on quantity purchases by organizations,
associations, and others. For details, contact the publisher.
First edition 2021
Second edition 2023
Design and production: Pamela Woodland
Cover art: © Clare Attwell, textile art,
Earth Dance, 2018, 43.5"x 36.75" (detail)
ISBN 978-1-7369082-0-4 (paper)
Library of Congress Control Number: 2021917427
Graph in Chapter 17: Pasts and Their Futures: Four Models by William R. Catton,
Jr., from page 252 of his book Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary
Change. Used by permission from the University of Illinois Press.
When the Earth is sick and dying,
there will come a tribe of people
from all races…
Who will put their faith in deeds,
not words, and make the planet
green again…
 Contents
Foreword to second edition
Preface
1 The cultural evolution of planetary collapse
2 Are we really in planetary collapse?
3 Are you saying humans are bad for the planet?
4 Let’s talk about regenerative design
5 Design pathways for Earth regeneration
6 Principles for creating regenerative economies
7 Regeneration at territorial scales
8 Design frameworks for holistic landscape management
9 Hold the Blue Marble in your sight
10 Let’s talk about prosocial behavior
11 Dealing with grief and trauma
12 A network of regenerative bioregions
13 The recipe for fundamentalist wars
14 The elixir for our protection
15 Our ancestors were all Indigenous
16 Education for bioregional design
17 The sneaky topic of carrying capacity
18 The beautiful dance of death in ecology
19 The Gaia Hypothesis for Earth Regeneration
20 Bring the Amazon rainforest back to life?
21 Safeguarding the Himalayan water supply
22 Heal the beating heart of Africa
23 A cautionary tale about entrenchment
24 Making humanity worth keeping around
25 What the design pathway might look like
26 A regenerated Earth
Afterword: The birth of Earth Regenerators
 Foreword to Second Edition
You hold in your hands a book that has already changed the
world. This was the case when it was first published—as you
can see in the story shared in the Afterword of this edition.
In this new Foreword, I would like to share what has
happened in the two years between then and now.
People all over the world have started living out the
design pathway presented in these pages. Large-scale
efforts are underway to regenerate entire landscapes.
Where my family lives in Barichara, Colombia, we are part
of a vibrant community network that is regenerating
500,000 hectares of land at the territorial scale. We have
raised money to purchase land, established a philanthropic
institution in the form of a territorial foundation, and
supported the weaving of more than 20 local regenerative
projects.
This was possible through the Earth Regenerators
platform that grew around this book. Thousands of people
gathered to learn about bioregions, the state of the planet,
and what it will take to ensure human survival in the years
ahead. We went on to establish the Design School for
Regenerating Earth whose core mission is outlined in the
chapters contained in these pages. We are now helping
organize “activation teams” in the Great Lakes, Colorado
River Basin, Cascadia in the Pacific Northwest, and the
Acadian Forests of the Northeast in North America, as well
as the Northern Andes in South America.
The movement is underway to regenerate the Earth and
you are invited to join us.
I was asked if there might be alterations I would like to
make to the text in this book now that two years have gone
by. The answer is no. What you find in these pages remains
deeply resonant with what we have collectively learned
while cultivating the social environments for collaboration
that are needed to regenerate landscapes, continents, and
the Earth as a whole. There are new discoveries and much
truly has been learned in the practice of establishing my
own food forest, helping bring syntropic agroforestry to the
Barichara community, and participating in the design of
distributed funding and governance at the landscape scale.
Yet the pages of this book remain true to their origins. The
best way to learn how to practice Earth regeneration is to
join the Design School where we help organize other
landscapes and create scaffolding for learning exchanges
among them. My recommendation would be to read this
book and then set up a study group with your friends.
Perhaps consider forming a book club to learn together.
Explore and feel into your story of place. Hold the grief of
all that has been—and soon will be—lost in the accelerating
patterns of planetary collapse that all of us are living
through together.
Then touch the soil. Gather local seeds. Play with children.
They each have much to teach you. And ask yourself about
legacy. How will you help regenerate the Earth?
Onward, fellow humans.
May 18th, 2023
 Preface
This is a book about what will need to happen if humanity is
to intentionally avoid extinction. It is a disturbing truth that
our current trajectory includes the real possibility that we
could fail to meet this objective—and as a result, bring
about our own demise.
I begin this hopeful treatise with such a somber message
because I honestly believe that those of us who embody
this intention will need to become highly skilled at
discerning what is happening in the real world. We must
take care not to sugarcoat the seriousness of our present
predicament. Nor should we presume that our demise is
already guaranteed. The people who study existential risk
(threats to our existence as a species) are well aware that
it is easy to project too strong a consequence on any given
cause that might do massive harm to humans.
At the same time, there are pitfalls that enable many
people to believe things are better than they actually are.
One story along these lines is the notion that we have until
the year 2030 to bring greenhouse gas emissions in check
to avoid catastrophic climate change. Study a little about
“abrupt” patterns of climate change and you will see that
we are already a few decades too late for this. One sobering
example is the shutdown of the Sahel Monsoon in sub-
Saharan Africa that took place in the late 1960s. It is now
known to have been caused by the burning of coal in
England, France, and Germany during early
industrialization between roughly 1870 and the 1940s. This
shutdown caused widespread drought and the collapse of
regional food production, and the ensuing starvation
combined with resource conflicts and genocides in the
region during the last few decades of the 20th century.
 Catastrophic climate change has already occurred in some
parts of the world. It happened before I was born and has
continued throughout my lifetime (and yours) without us
being aware that this was the case. If we were unable to
discern this reality, what other truths are we missing? How
might the stories we tell ourselves be misleading,
incomplete, or downright wrong?
This challenge of discernment applies equally well to how
we understand what does work for addressing our planetary
predicament. There is a growing awareness that the extent
of deforestation is a significant contributor to the drying out
of landscapes, increased risk of landslides, and loss of
carbon to the atmosphere. Campaigns have been launched
to “plant a billion trees” and restore health to the Earth. Yet
those with ecological training will observe that there is a
profound functional difference between what are effectively
giant monoculture tree farms—like so many of the “forests”
in the Pacific Northwest of the United States comprised
mainly of Douglas firs—and real forest ecosystems that
have gone through the stages of ecological succession while
increasing the number of interrelated niches for diverse
species to coexist within them.
Planting a lot of trees is another expression of the
machine metaphor for nature that seeks to execute a
simple protocol to restore landscape functions. However, the
co-creative dance of growing within a developing forest
ecosystem is more like realizing we are part of a family web
composed of many brother and sister species of plants,
animals, fungi, and bacteria, all orchestrating themselves
and each other into harmonious interdependencies that
allow their resilience to come alive. This kind of distinction
can be found in many other presumed solutions that won’t
work because they are not adequately contextualized or
clearly-enough understood to see what the truly systemic
alternatives need to be.
The old adage tells us that we must have the courage to
change what can be changed and the wisdom to separate
wheat from chaff, to discern what might yet be changed.
The regeneration of Earth is a process that humanity must
enact in the middle of a planetary-scale collapse. Some
things cannot be changed, like the fact that catastrophic
climate disruptions have already caused widespread human
suffering. Other things, one might say, should never have
been allowed to happen in the first place, like the invention
of the Haber-Bosch process for manufacturing the synthetic
fertilizers that enabled the human population to grow to
billions beyond our carrying capacity.
Yet there is also a horizon of hope beyond the despair that
deserves to be recognized and honored. We really can do
something worthwhile for our descendants that is worthy of
these times. What must be done—and how to do it—is the
subject matter of this book. Together we will explore how to
regenerate the Earth and safeguard humanity’s future.
Are you ready? There’s no time to waste. Let us begin.
 1
The cultural evolution of
planetary collapse
Any well-trained doctor will tell you that it is necessary to
move beyond the treatment of symptoms to heal what
actually causes the suffering within a patient. If a medical
intervention is to work, the root causes of an illness must
be identified along with a rigorous understanding of how
the involved systems of the body function together.
Similarly, a skilled engineer will say that you have to
understand the principles and processes involved in the
design of structural solutions if you want their
implementation to go according to plan.
We are immersed in an incredibly complex situation. Many
causes are involved at the same time, operating at a
multitude of scales in space and time and interacting in
often unpredictable ways. A huge policy discourse has
arisen around climate change, for example. But is it the
cause of our woes or merely a symptom of something
deeper? Is the size of the human population combined with
excessive patterns of consumption a predetermined strain
on planetary resources? Or is it merely an unintended
consequence of inadequate decision-making when dealing
with an interdependent and increasingly globalized
economy? Does the exponential pace of technological
change create new solutions? Or does it destabilize
increasingly outdated systems so that they cannot be
managed effectively?
This mental exercise is meant to give us pause. How can
we possibly discern what is really going on when so much is
beyond our ability to comprehend? Is there a “radical”
surgery that gets to the root causes of planetary
disruption? How might the root causes be discerned? What
kinds of designed interventions might be up to the task of
safeguarding humanity’s future?
Further still, when we talk about humanity’s future are we
talking about keeping the human population elevated to
levels higher than seven billion? Or might we need to think
like planetary ecologists and attempt to discern the
thresholds associated with carrying capacities that place
truly viable human population counts at a much lower
number?
All of this has to do with the cultural evolution of
humanity and our relationship to the larger environmental
contexts in which it has unfolded. I would like to take a few
minutes and share the story that has emerged from careful
deliberation and debate among anthropologists,
evolutionary biologists, archaeologists, and paleontologists,
along with others in related fields of study, that have made
it possible to tell the human story in detail.
I will make the case that the current planetary overshoot-
and-collapse took root long ago in human history—even
before our own species was birthed into an African
savannah three or four hundred thousand years ago. Some
might say our global crisis was caused by industrialism and
the use of fossil fuels. Others assert that the birth of
agriculture roughly ten thousand years ago made it possible
to create complex hierarchical societies, some of which
evolved into empires and civilizations. I go farther back in
time and place the seeds of Earth disruption about three
million years ago when our ancient ancestors (who were
not anatomically modern humans, yet were still hominids)
gained the distinct ability for conceptual metaphor.
 These “tool-using” hominids could look at a wedge of rock
and see in it a carving utensil. With careful striking motions
against another rock, they could chip away at the material
pieces that didn’t fit this mental mold until the wedge
became manipulable with human hands to cut and slice
whatever might be useful to human bodies. This early step
in the externalization of a bodily function—in this case,
using a carved rock to serve functions previously restricted
to fingernails and teeth—enabled these Homo habilis tool-
users to scavenge food scraps more effectively and digest
more nutritious calories with their enhanced implements of
mastication.
With this development something profound, of a
thermodynamic nature, took place. The capacity to take
energy and materials from the environment more efficiently
allowed more of it to be converted into the biomass of
hominid bodies. A thermodynamic exchange brought more
of the external world into the creation of hominid
livelihoods. According to the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics,
which states that the entropy within a system can never go
down during an exchange of energy, this meant that as
complexity in the environment was reduced, the complexity
of human populations (measured in population numbers
and biological organization) went up.
This process of simplifying environments to increase
hominid biomass took another evolutionary leap about a
million years later, when other ancestors of ours gained the
ability to control the use of fire. This new ability irreversibly
altered the course of human history because the emergence
of cooking took evolutionary selection pressure off one of
the biggest energy drains on mammalian bodies—digestion
—and therefore allowed the “energy gains” to gradually
accumulate in the body’s other great energy hog, the brain.
 Think about it this way. The two systems within bodies like
ours that demand the greatest amounts of energy are the
brains and the intestines. Stand a gorilla next to a human
today, and you will see some similarities in bone structure,
shape of hands, appearance of eyes, and so forth. You will
also notice that gorillas have a proportionally much larger
gut than we do. Why? Because their intestinal tract is 40%
longer when scaled for comparison with human bodies.
Gorillas need a lot more guts than we do to digest their
food safely.
The invention of fire was a cultural practice that
fundamentally altered hominid social behaviors, as we will
explore in more depth later in this story. It also relaxed the
need to slowly digest foods in a tropical environment where
parasites are commonplace. Cooked meat is already pre-
digested and cleansed of dangerous bacteria, worms, and
other microorganisms so that the digestive system doesn’t
have to do as much work to get the energy and nutrients
out of it.
These energy savings in the gut relaxed selection pressure
on the accumulation of energy-intensive nerve cells in the
brain, which opened up the evolutionary pathway that built
up to increasingly complex structures in the brains of
hominid descendants. At the same time, just like with the
cutting tools of their ancestors, the controlled use of fire
could burn through the complex structures of a landscape
and convert more of it into charred remains to convert into
human bodies through consumption and digestion. Again,
there was a pattern of reducing the complexity of the
outside world to increase the complexity of hominid
populations.
In those days, there weren’t enough hominids around to
keep ecology at bay. The reductions in environmental
complexity accelerated ecological succession—the
developmental pattern of sequential stages for ecosystems
—in some contexts, so they didn’t have cumulative long-
term effects. As we will see below, this changed
dramatically when, with the discovery and use of fossil
fuels, the human population began to grow exponentially.
From this later point onward, ecosystems became
overwhelmed by the pace, scale, and intensity of
environmental degradation wrought by human cultural
practices.
This pattern of structural transformation is the basis of the
planetary crisis we are living through today. The story
continues at an accelerating pace when we recognize that
the increasing brain sizes of hominid descendants that
accompanied the simplification of landscapes through
controlled burns led to a special kind of “niche
construction.” This transformation has since achieved what
Michael Tomasello calls a ratchet effect to scaffold the
acceleration of cultural evolution in a parallel feedback loop
with alterations in biology.
Let me unpack this a little bit.
The use of stone tools for cutting and slicing was a cultural
innovation. Yet it was one that enabled the biological
evolution of its stone-tool users to take selection pressure
away from sharp nails and teeth while increasing the fitness
of the species as its population grew steadily (yet very
slowly) over the next million years. Then the cultural
innovation of cooking arose and took evolutionary pressure
away from the biology of large intestinal tracts, making it
possible for the increased efficiencies of energy and
nutrients that are required to grow larger brains.
A niche is an environmental structure that an organism
can functionally use to increase its fitness. In some cases,
like with birds that establish a nest, the niche may be used
by one generation but must be rebuilt in future
generations. Yet in other cases, like that of a beaver that
builds its dam in such a way that river flows are
persistently altered, the niche may be inherited by future
generations that didn’t have to create it themselves.
For humans, we live today in elaborate built environments
that slowly (though sometimes quickly) accumulated an
increasing diversity of inheritable niches that none of us
needed to build ourselves in our lifetimes. New Yorkers can
take the subway designed and structured into their urban
landscape by ancestors several generations back with a
regimen of maintenance and gradual improvements that
are manageable within existing constraints. This capacity to
create niches and inherit them as built structures also has a
long history in our species. Among the many cultural
innovations enabled by larger brains among hominids who
increasingly organized themselves around cooking fires was
the accumulation of conceptual language capacities that
dramatically increased their aptitudes for communication
and coordinated action.
Cooperation in the form of hunting parties, guided
learning with instruction, the passing along of previously-
vetted information, and other highly valuable expressions
arose within the “social niches” of shared language groups.
Those who learned the gestures, movements, and symbols
of a given culture could inherit powerful capacities to
further alter environments in ways that served the survival
of hominid lines. This scaffolding of cultural development
enabled cultures to grow increasingly elaborate, and the
alteration of environments to serve human needs grew
along with it.
 From here the story becomes more convoluted—partly
because it began to speed up and thus had more twists and
turns, and partly because the ability to form social niches
gave rise to a splendid diversity of human cultures, once
anatomically-modern Homo sapiens entered the scene.
Jump ahead to 100,000 years ago, and you will see the
clear evidence for ritual burials, symbolic art, and spiritual
worldviews in our ancestral line. Reconstructions of climatic
and ecological history reveal a drama of continuous change
as humans entered new environments (like when all the
megafauna of Australia and North America disappeared
shortly after humans arrived). And human populations had
to contend with rapidly-changing environments whenever
climate shifted dramatically (like when a new ice age took
hold and forced migration from present-day Europe back
into parts of northern Africa).
It wasn’t until the end of the last ice age—when a long-
term and stable warm period began that lasted more than
10,000 years, a period known as the Holocene—that
complex, densely populated city-states and agrarian
societies began to crop up in the fertile crescent of the
Middle East, as well as in Northern Africa, Southeast Asia,
and throughout Central America. The rise of empires and
civilizations is a sweeping drama of the Holocene period
that eventually enabled a planetary-scale economic system
to appear over the last 500 years. This system is what has
allowed us to cross numerous planetary boundaries, and
has destabilized the self-regulating processes of the Earth
itself.
This part of the story is where the “planetary” in planetary
predicament becomes emphatic.
Throughout the Holocene, all empires and civilizations
have undergone diverse expressions of collapse. Some were
followed by quick rebounds in slightly altered form, while
others decimated their landscapes to such a degree that
they remain harsh, barren deserts many thousands of years
later. Yet it wasn’t until the frontier conquest of America by
European monarchies that the globalized system took hold
—allowing specific cultural models of extraction to take root
in the colonial systems of wealth-hoarding they
constructed. These extractive practices were massively
amplified when fossil fuels began to be utilized. Then we
saw the emergence of the Earth’s first globalized human
economy, with greatly enhanced capacities to reduce the
complexity of non-human ecosystems by transforming them
into increasingly complex human social systems.
All of the wealth inherent in our globalized economy has
come at the expense of degraded landscapes. The condition
of these landscapes is so normalized today that most of us
privileged enough to fly barely even look out the windows
of our fossil-fueled airplanes and see the fenced-off patches
of deforested Earth below us, let alone introspect about
them. These fields of degradation have long since replaced
the resilient meshwork of ecosystems that were consumed
by extractive human cultures during the last few millennia.
Thus we have the depletion of soils, accelerating loss of
non-human species, intensifying destabilization of planetary
climate, and all the other environmental ills that define our
predicament in the 21st century. I call this runaway cultural
evolution because the ratchet effects of social niche
construction and scaffolded cultural development have
achieved the breakout of exponential growth in pace, scale,
and complexity for the globalized economy within which we
all live, in some form or another, today.
Cultural evolution in the hominid line began to
differentiate itself from the mechanisms of biological
evolution about three million years ago. Increasingly, the
“dual-inheritance” of culture and biology together enabled a
third inheritance system to arise in the altered social and
ecological structures of niches that could be built upon from
one generation to the next. This system enabled the
process to become self-amplifying until it achieved
exponential take-off. It has since proven itself to be a force
of geological significance as a subset of human cultures
gained the ability to alter Earth systems and destabilize the
entire biosphere of our home planet.
Understanding the interdependent functions of this
biology-culture-niche feedback system is key to designing
for the restoration of systemic health for the Earth. Like the
doctor who works to address root causes, or the engineer
who carefully takes the time to learn the principles and
processes involved in their designs, those of us seeking to
regenerate the Earth will need to hold this complex
dynamic of cultural evolution in mind as we go about our
work of restoring vital ecological functions to the
landscapes that provide for our livelihoods.
We are in the midst of runaway cultural evolution. It is not
the burning of fossil fuels or the spread of consumer
marketing (or any of a host of other causes comprising
subsets of the overall system) that we must address. More
deeply, we must learn how to mindfully design social niches
so that they co-evolve with our biological and cultural
heritages, and participate in the natural ecological
processes of regeneration that Earth’s biosphere already
knows how to do much better than we do.
With this in mind, let us continue. There is still more
ground to cover and we have a lot of regenerative work
that needs to be done.
 Discussion Questions for Chapter 1
As you consider the ramifications of cultural evolution, it
may be helpful to reflect carefully on the process of social
niche formation. I hope these exploratory questions will be
helpful.
Discussion Question #1 :: What does it mean to form
a social niche? How is it possible to inherit one and
then build upon it?
Each of us was born into a specific cultural context that we
didn’t create ourselves. This includes the built environment
around us, stories told by our caregivers, lessons about how
to succeed in life, and even language itself. We go through
our lives building upon inheritances such as these—often
without realizing how profoundly unusual this is in the
biological world.
Take a few moments to reflect on the social niches that
shaped your identity when you were a child. Did you see
yourself as being from a particular cultural group? Were
there aspects of your youth that shaped how you grew into
an adult? Consider the social supports created by living
within these social niches. And then ponder how
challenging it can be trying to break away from them to live
differently.
Discussion Question #2 :: What does it mean to say
that runaway cultural evolution is the root cause of
our planetary predicament?
The exponential rate of change in technology is well-known
in the world today. How might we think about the various
ways that new innovations build upon the scaffolding of
that which came before? When I wrote about runaway
cultural evolution, the focus was on the consequences of
inheriting social niches that had long-lived consequences
earlier in the history of humanity. Yet when they grew in
sophistication and were able to accelerate thanks to
breakthroughs in transport, energy, and organized
institutions, a fundamental change in the pace and scale of
change came about.
Consider how powerful human cultural change can be. The
invention of the plow. The steam engine. Digital computers.
Accounting systems. Highways. And a whole lot more. As
these elements of culture interact across a growing
diversity of human social groups, there is an increased
likelihood for some kind of lift-off that goes way beyond
what was possible before. How do you see the discovery of
fossil fuels (as one important example) enabling the
explosion of exponential changes that have occurred in the
last 150 years? How might cultural evolutionary processes
like these become fundamental drivers of planetary
change?
Discussion Question #3 :: How can we learn more
about cultural evolution so that “the problem
becomes the solution” while we learn how to
regenerate the Earth?
In permaculture, there is a principle that says we can
partner with patterns in our environments by carefully
observing them and then thoughtfully beginning to shape
how they evolve. Throughout the rest of this book, we will
explore a variety of ways to manage and influence the
evolution of human culture. For now, I merely invite you to
think about the aspects of human culture in all its splendid
diversity that might enable some human groups to achieve
harmony while living in their landscapes.
How are these cultures organized? What kinds of ethics do
they live by? How might we learn from their use of
technology, language, the arts, and so forth, as we seek to
become more sustainable in this uniquely dangerous period
of human history? How can we prepare the next few
generations of humans to shape cultural evolution
intentionally, and what might the implications be, given all
that is now known about our global challenges?

Further Readings
Henrich, Joseph. The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is
Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and
Making Us Smarter.
Jablonka, Eva, and Manson J. Lamb. Evolution in Four
Dimensions: Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral, and Symbolic
Variation in the History of Life.
Mesoudi, Alex. Cultural Evolution: How Darwinian Theory
Can Explain Human Culture and Synthesize the Social
Sciences.
Odling-Smee, F. John, Kevin N. Laland, and Marcus W.
Feldman. Niche Construction: The Neglected Process in
Evolution.
Richerson, Peter, and Robert Boyd. Not by Genes Alone:
How Culture Transformed Human Evolution.
Wilson, David Sloan. Evolution for Everyone: How Darwin’s
Theory Can Change the Way We Think About Our Lives.
Wrangham, Richard. Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us
Human.
 2
Are we really in
planetary collapse?
This book started off with a claim that warrants careful
elaboration. Is it really the case that we are already in
planetary overshoot-and-collapse? The mental image that
comes to mind for many people when considering this idea
is one of warfare, starvation, and loss of human life. It
tends to be thought of in anthropocentric terms and
imagined as a singular historic event—like a Hollywood
drama taking place over a small amount of time and
transpiring with a flood of intensity.
Real societal collapses don’t work this way. Researchers
who study the fall of Rome will tell you that there were
stages and cycles, advancements and retreats, ebbs and
flows of social complexity rising and falling over the span of
several centuries. Even with “simpler” cases like Easter
Island, the dynamics played out over more than one human
generation, and enough nuance was involved that
archaeologists remain vexed about many of the details of
what actually happened.
Planetary collapses are even more remote from this
imagined scenario and are of a qualitatively different level
of complexity, which makes them even harder to visualize.
In the workshops I have given on this topic, I begin with
the provocative claim that no human mind is capable of
fully grasping what a planetary collapse is. So how can I
paradoxically assert that we know we are already in the
middle of one?
 That is the topic we come to now. For if we are to
regenerate the Earth, we must carefully discern where we
are in the process and what the ground truths are for what
can and cannot be avoided in the next few decades. My
objective in this chapter is not to fully describe what a
planetary collapse is. That would be at odds with what I
claimed in the previous paragraph about how
incomprehensible and intractable this topic is. There are
overwhelming complexities involved in the collapse of
ecosystems, cultures, and the biosphere as a whole. I have
been studying and attempting to contend with the different
aspects of planetary evolution for twenty years; I have only
glimpsed the contours of this massive beast because it
defies perception in so many ways.
Instead, my objective will be to help you cultivate a
sensibility about what planetary collapse is like, so you can
practice discerning it in your daily life. Efforts to regenerate
the Earth will call upon many sensible people to work
together as we navigate the complexities of planetary
change. All of us must learn how to remain in open
dialogue and critical inquiry with the world around us as it
repeatedly shifts above us, around us, and beneath our
feet.
With this in mind, let us continue.
Students of Earth’s history will be aware that it is 4.5
billion years old, has had continuous life on it for 3.8 billion
years, and is divided into epochs that last millions of years
each, during which the planet goes through dramatic
changes. All of this occurs over incomprehensible spans of
time. We will need to try practicing the humility that such
vastness evokes as we seek to make sense of this Sixth
Mass Extinction event caused by runaway cultural evolution
in the human lineage.
 Those seeking to dismiss the findings of climate science
often do the sleight-of-hand trick of employing cherry-
picked research from the very same field they seek to
condemn as useless, by describing how Earth’s climate has
always been changing. This is true, of course. The climate
system is a dynamic meshwork of interacting processes that
remains far from equilibrium—so it is literally true that it is,
at some level, always changing. Yet this insight fails to
acknowledge how the only way that 10,000+ climate
scientists can explain the observed warming trends of the
atmosphere, and have their models track the observational
record, is to include the burning of fossil fuels and the
altering of landscapes caused by human activities.
Data gathered from pollen in mountain lakes converges
with temperatures calculated from gas bubbles in ice cores
drilled into glaciers. Satellite measurements of atmospheric
and land surface changes align with changes to the built
environment. Whether considered over millions of years or
during the last few decades, the evidence all comes
together to show how human activities further, and
dramatically, alter our changing Earth.
This vast diversity of data trends shows how a Great
Acceleration has come to dominate planetary evolution.
Explosive changes have arisen over the last 150 years by
nearly every measure that is possible to observe. Together
they provide incontrovertible evidence that humans are
causing the planetary destabilization so clearly visible in
datasets for carbon dioxide levels, the changing acidity of
the world ocean, and other key empirical trends like
biodiversity loss, erosion of topsoils, and the microplastics
filling virtually every available water supply on Earth.
For our purposes, we need to accept this validated finding
from climate science and then go deeper into what studies
of Earth Systems have to tell us about the last five or six
million years. When we do this, we begin to discover that
our common ancestor with other great apes parted ways at
around this time. Climate change was one of the driving
factors as central and eastern Africa dried out, causing
jungles to give way to mixed landscapes of patchy
woodlands, marshy lakes, and grassy savannas.
As our hominid ancestors began their long walk towards
unleashing cultural evolution onto the Earth, another
geologic activity was underway that would profoundly
influence the kinds of humans that emerged throughout the
process. Plate tectonics moved North and South America
toward each other until about four million years ago when
they slid together to form the isthmus of what is now
Central America. When this happened, a profound
reshaping of planetary climate emerged because the
equatorial flow of ocean water between these continents
was forced to gush poleward around the southern tip of
Argentina—creating a huge thermal pump that carried heat
toward the poles as it moved along in the ocean currents.
Thus began the Age of Ice Ages. Our ancestors had to
contend with massive shifts in planetary climate as ice
sheets formed, lowering the world ocean and profoundly
altering the contours of air, water, and land. They learned
how to adapt to these changes while also struggling when
the opposite transpired. Ice sheets would recede, and ocean
levels then rose accordingly. The Earth became a crucible of
planetary instability, with long periods of ice age drought
(precipitation goes down when fresh water gets locked in
mile-high sheets of ice) lasting hundreds of thousands of
years. These phases were followed by briefer and more
turbulent periods of intermittent warmth, which ranged
from a few thousand to a few dozen thousand years before
another ice age commenced.
 If geologist William Ruddiman is correct, all of this came to
an end when humans achieved their modern form during
the most recent ice age. After this ice age concluded, the
warm and stable period of the Holocene commenced, and
several human cultures learned how to develop agricultural
systems for a new social model of empire. Ruddiman is one
of the scientists who helped confirm that the “Milankovitch
Cycles” of parameters for geometric relationships between
the Earth and the Sun were in fact what drove the ice age
dynamics of the last few million years. He calculated when
the Holocene should have ended based on these parameters
and noted that the arrival of the next ice age was delayed
by several thousand years.
He then ran calculations for how many greenhouse gases
were released into the atmosphere from the slow changes
in landscapes from human use. Over a roughly four
thousand-year period, a significant portion of the Earth was
deforested and converted into agriculture and housing for
all of the city-states that grew during this time. This was a
gradual process, involving all of the Holocene empires on
Earth. What he discovered—which created quite a
controversy among his colleagues until it gradually came to
be accepted as more research ensued—was that human
activities during the Holocene were very likely to have
brought the Age of Ice Ages to an end.
Imagine this: human-caused climate change was
responsible for stopping the next ice age from taking hold.
And it happened between 8,000 and 4,000 years ago. Our
collective impacts on the planet were strong enough in
aggregate to overcome the thermal pump of the world
ocean. Our empires and civilizations created a stronger
signal than the world ocean pulling heat around South
America on a daily basis. When combined with changing
geographic patterns of solar energy across the latitudes of
the planet, they were more potent than this energy flow
that had driven the expansion and recession of ice ages for
the two and a half million years prior to the empires’
arrival.
If human cultures could alter landscapes on such a scale in
4,000 years, imagine what we managed to do when we
started burning the coal and oil that had taken 200 million
years to form (and which we will have nearly burned
through in six orders of magnitude less time—a mere 200
years). The losses in biodiversity, alterations to
compositional landscapes, and shifted trajectories of
planetary processes have been building up for quite some
time. Roughly since the birth of industrialism, what has
happened is the supercharging of an existing pattern that
had been growing in strength for tens of thousands of
years.
So when we talk about planetary collapse, as we will now,
it is vital to keep in mind that there are nested levels of
influence that are all happening together. Some take years
or decades. Others take centuries or millennia. And they
interact with each other through a plurality of feedbacks
that count in the thousands, possibly millions, when we
take the time to zoom in and see what is really going on.
I like to use the framework of Planetary Boundaries to
help make planetary collapse feel more graspable. It was
developed by a community of Earth System scientists
through the coordinating efforts of the Stockholm
Resilience Centre. They asked a very powerful question:
How do we define a safe operating space for humanity with
all that is currently known about how the Earth’s various
systems function and interact with each other? This
question led them to a list of nine key processes that have
some calculated or yet-to-be-determined threshold and
that, if crossed, would make human civilization untenable
at planetary scales.
Let me say this more plainly. There are nine critical
thresholds—each for a core dynamic pattern of the Earth—
that together define a safe operating space for humanity.
The thresholds are for biosphere integrity, climate change,
land-system change, freshwater use, biogeochemical flows
of nitrogen and phosphorus, ocean acidification,
atmospheric aerosol loading, stratospheric ozone depletion,
and a catch-all category for unimagined risks called novel
entities. If even one of these critical thresholds is crossed,
it is game over for globalized humanity.
Some of the planetary boundaries are well understood.
Others are fraught with uncertainties. It is possible that no
single threshold exists for a few of them as they interact
with each other. But the act of creating such a list naturally
begs a follow-up question: If there are nine boundaries, and
the crossing of even one of them is too much, how many
have we already crossed? This was answered in a peer-
reviewed paper published in 2011.
Four. We have already crossed four of them.
The take-home message from this exercise is that we are
already in planetary overshoot-and-collapse. What are the
four boundaries that have already been crossed? The
extinction rate of species in biosphere integrity; loss of
ecological complexity in landscapes due to land-system
change; geochemical cycling of nitrogen and phosphorus
due to fertilizer use in industrial agriculture; and climate
change, mainly due to the combustion of fossil fuels and the
land-system changes just mentioned.
As this book goes to print, the number is likely to rise
from four to six. The researchers exploring the planetary
boundaries of Earth are preparing an update to their
previous assessments—last published in 2015—and they
see freshwater use and ocean acidification changing so
quickly that they may soon be added to the list. Implied in
this is that in just a few years we are cascading through a
lockstep of tipping points as planetary stability unravels
around us.
We have overshot the Earth’s ability to regulate itself in
these domains of planetary function. And collapse patterns
are evident in domains of stability that previously existed
but are stable no more. These domains of stability are no
longer tenable as the planetary dynamics interact and
accentuate each other while humans accelerate our impacts
on all of them at an exponential rate. So not only have we
crossed four planetary boundaries, but the impacts grow
daily and are driving us farther from the safe zone of
stability necessary to continue having complex societies on
Earth.
When I speak about how we are already in planetary
collapse, this is what I am talking about in ecological terms.
Yet there are other collapse patterns within human societies
that are also in play. Namely, the collapse of real economic
activities as debt-bubbles of financial speculation balloon to
represent 80% of the global economy; the collapse of
ecoliteracy as the majority of humans now live in cities and
have effectively zero contact with healthy ecosystems at
any point in their lives; the collapse of functioning
democracies as wealth-hoarding and structural inequality
enable billions to be spent on election propaganda to buy
political outcomes. And so forth.
Continue adding more of these patterns to the story of
global change and it quickly becomes overwhelming—which
is why I suggest that no single human mind is capable of
comprehending it all. We will need to trust in others as they
see parts of the system emerging beyond our own
awareness. There is a significant mangle of issues that
merges individual discernment with collective capacities to
make effective decisions. We will need to learn how to learn
together as we navigate the maelstrom of planetary
collapse for the rest of our lives.
This chapter is like dipping your toe into the ocean. A
great deal more can be said about planetary collapse. Entire
libraries have been written on different subjects relating to
it. I personally have a collection of roughly 1000 of these
books in a research library I set up for the study of cultural
evolution and planetary change. All I hope to convey with
this brief overview is that planetary collapse is indeed
happening. We are already in the middle of it. And our
abilities to regenerate the Earth will fundamentally depend
upon how well we discern this reality at each step along the
way as we strive to live out our lives in the midst of it.
 Discussion Questions for Chapter 2
We can go further into this topic by reflecting on just how
extreme the times in which we are now living are and how
unprepared most of us are for dealing with it.
Discussion Question #1 :: How does it make you feel
to consider that we might be in the midst of planetary
collapse?
The intellectual challenges involved in this discussion are
tiny compared with the emotional ones. Most of us feel
anxiety and stress when we give attention to our planetary
predicament. This often leads to dismissal or denial. It
prompts many of us to grasp at overly simplistic solutions
that are not adequate to what must actually be done. At the
core of our ability to regenerate the Earth will be a capacity
for acceptance that is often very hard-won.
As you sit with this question, perhaps it will help to take a
deep breath or go for a walk. Find a friend who knows you
well and talk to them about your feelings. Remember to
focus on things that bring you peace or joy because you will
need them to find your center again as you actively
meditate on the dire state of the world. Then ask yourself
why it is that most political discourse on the planetary crisis
has reduced its complexity to some subset of the problem.
For example, why is the loss of biodiversity kept separate
from carbon dioxide levels in the way policies are
developed? How might our feelings be what gets in the way
of dealing adequately with these immense complexities?
Discussion Question #2 :: Which evidence do you
personally find to be the most convincing that we
actually are in planetary collapse?
Focus is often given to how we might persuade others to
think the same way we do about the global crisis. I invite
you to go in the other direction. Hold awareness for what
has compelled you to draw your own conclusions. How did
you find your way to this place of knowing? Whose
information did you trust? Which key experiences or
moments in your life shaped how you interpreted this
information?
Each of us is living through this extremely bizarre period
in Earth history. It is our own responsibility to make sense
of what is happening and live accordingly. Rather than
trying to make the strongest case possible for you to agree
with me, I much prefer that you work it out on your own.
My hope is that this chapter and those that follow will help
you frame your responses to questions like these when
confronted with them in the future.
Discussion Question #3 :: Where are your doubts and
suspicions about the story I have told about planetary
collapse?
It is also important to consider different arguments and
explore their implications. Are there assumptions you carry
that differ from mine? If so, how do they arise as challenges
to what has been presented in this chapter? We are living
through a very precarious time and our prospects for a
thriving future will be impacted by the extent to which each
of us takes this seriously.
Don’t merely take my word for it. Ask yourself: What is
the meaning of planetary collapse? Is this an accurate
framing of what is happening in the world? Does it
correspond with your experiences? Where do you feel
things are getting better? On which time frames? And to
whom do the benefits accrue? Might there be blind spots in
your thinking that cause you to draw conclusions from
these patterns? Or might it be the case that these trends
counter the evidence that collapse is occurring?
 Further Readings
Burroughs, William James. Climate Change in Prehistory:
The End of the Reign of Chaos.
Catton Jr., William. Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of
Revolutionary Change.
Flannery, Tim. Here on Earth: A Natural History of the
Planet.
Greer, John Michael. Collapse Now and Avoid the Rush: The
Best of the Archdruid Report.
Kolbert, Elizabeth. The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural
History.
Meadows, Donella, Jorgen Randers, and Dennis Meadows.
Limits to Growth: The 30 Year Update.
Tainter, Joseph. The Collapse of Complex Societies.
Zalasiewicz, Jan, and Mark Williams. The Goldilocks Planet:
The Four Billion Year Story of Earth’s Climate.
 3
Are you saying humans
are bad for the planet?
Taking stock of what has been said so far, it could easily
begin to feel like I am describing how destructive and
harmful humans are to our home planet, and thus I believe
we are something like a disease or plague that is inflicting
pain on the Earth’s biosphere. This is an area where great
care is required to practice ethical discernment about what
the science of evolution has to tell us regarding the way
things work.
As sophisticated as the story is up to this point, I have still
only brushed it in broad strokes and left out a great many
important details. One of them is the vital observation that
as we assess the nature of humanity in ethical terms, we
must carefully reflect upon the cultural diversity in human
societies throughout the history of our species. The growth
of empires and civilizations during the Holocene is a process
that competed with, and in subtle ways internalized,
aspects of the many Indigenous cultures that they
assimilated, displaced, or destroyed along the way.
Thus far, I have painted the contours of ecological collapse
due to human culture. Let me now sketch a contour of
ecological integration and resilience due to human culture.
Students of permaculture, landscape restoration,
conservation biology, and all related domains of
management where humans co-create as part of a larger
ecological web will know that it is possible to have a net
positive effect on living systems at both small and large
scales. Perhaps the most dramatic example of this is the
Amazon Rainforest of South America.
Cultural anthropology is filled with detailed ethnographic
case studies of Indigenous peoples living in this vast jungle
of branching waterways bounded by mountains. The
Amazon is known to be home to millions of species and
hundreds of human cultural groups. Diversity is the lesson;
uniformity, an illusion. One of the paradoxical insights
about the Amazon is that its many banks are sources of
downriver erosion that pull nutrients away from the higher
ground and disperse them into floodplains or the ocean.
Thus these areas should be places of poor soil quality due
to the hydrological processes involved.
And yet, there we find terra preta, the healthiest and most
productive type of soil on Earth. This black soil runs deep
along the upper banks and inland jungle areas of the
Amazon. It enables an incredible richness of life to thrive in
the mixed ecosystems of jungle and river. By geologic
accounts alone, it shouldn’t be there. But it is. Terra preta
is a human innovation—grown through cultural adaptations
of composting biomass and improving the productivity of
soils in a region that has had human occupants for at least
ten thousand years.
Zoom out to the landscape scale, as one might do by flying
over parts of the Amazon with remote sensing equipment,
and we learn that the canopy structure of the forests
reveals the touch of human hands. The tree composition,
layered structure, and productive qualities of the Amazon
rainforests demonstrate that the species of plants thriving
there have been selected and enhanced for human use over
several thousand years to support an increase in the
number of people capable of living and thriving there.
 Said another way, the Amazon is a food forest. It is what
permaculture designers might call a climax ecosystem, one
that maximizes human yields by working with the living
systems of the land in a harmonious way. There are more
species of plants with beneficial uses for humans than
would have been the case if humans had not dispersed the
seeds, selectively pruned the forest canopy, and shaped it
for human subsistence.
Humans can be good for a forest.
Consider the milpas of Mexico, too, which show how
sophisticated a landscape management process can be.
These are small farm plots consisting of about a dozen food
crops—with the famous “three sisters” of corn, beans, and
squash always among them—that are located in the tropical
jungle. They are created by an Indigenous technique many
of us know today as slash-and-burn which, when done
properly, is capable of increasing soil fertility while
maintaining biodiversity. What they do is cut out a small
patch of jungle, burn the plant materials as a fertilizer, then
begin a 5–10-year cycle of multi-crop food production. This
is followed by actively planting the right combinations of
tree species to turn back into jungle within a decade or so
later. In total, they have a roughly 25-year cycle of food
production combined with textiles for clothing and
construction materials for building, all of which keep the
health of the larger forest intact.
Herein lies the paradox. Cultural evolution can lead to
seemingly magical functional harmonies between humans
and their environments. The Amazon is in subtle ways a
built environment just as profoundly as New York, yet is
built on very different metaphors, ethical relationships, and
functional objectives. Tropical jungles all over the world
have higher proportions of species that are beneficial to
humans while maintaining ecological integrity on timescales
spanning thousands of years. Humans have such diverse
cultural capacities that we can nurture life on scales as
large as the largest river system on Earth while we are
simultaneously capable of destabilizing our home planet’s
biosphere in such a way that it could bring about our own
extinction.
Are we bad for the planet? The answer depends on what
kinds of cultural systems spread themselves across the
diversity of all human creativity. We have a statistical
problem before us. The small number of cultures built on
assumptions about human separation from (and domination
over) the natural world have managed to unleash
exponential and cumulative cultural powers that destroy
ecosystems at all scales. Yet numerous small-scale societies
have had more mixed relational successes with their
surroundings. Not all Indigenous cultures are sustainable.
But all human cultures that have been demonstrated to be
sustainable are Indigenous.
Stop and let that sink in. I am not presenting the illusory
tale of the noble savage here. It is not the case that some
idealistic stereotype has ever existed of peaceful humans
living in a Garden of Eden. Violence and conflict,
environmental destruction, and harms of many kinds have
been part of the human drama in both small- and large-
scale societies. And yet there has emerged, on occasion, a
confluence of cultural adaptations to specific places that has
proven capable of achieving stability and sustainable
existence for multi-thousand-year stretches of time.
I am telling the story in this way because I want to
increase our capacity for ethical discernment. Many
ideological judgments exist about what makes society work
and how “good” or “bad” it is with respect to often
unconsciously accepted beliefs about the values and ethical
norms involved. When we begin to explore the design of
regenerative cultures, this kind of ethical baggage will get
in our way. So let us begin to practice dealing with it now.
While it is the case historically that no empires or
civilizations have ever demonstrated a capacity for
sustainability—all of them have gone through boom-bust
cycles of growth and expansion followed by eventual
collapse—it is also the case that most human cultures have
gone away with the passage of time. This is analogous to
the biological observation that more than 99% of all species
in Earth’s 3.8 billion-year history of life have gone extinct.
A similar assessment could be made to show that human
cultures emerge and disappear with changing
environmental contexts in such a way that nearly all of
them are extinct today.
We cannot simply say Indigenous = good as a design
criterion. The way most of us have been taught to construct
categories is to treat them as lists of criteria comprising the
necessary-and-sufficient conditions to be part of that
category. This is largely how Western philosophy has been
built up in the last two thousand years. One of the most
revolutionary aspects of Charles Darwin’s work was
targeting this notion of universal (and permanent)
categories as fundamentally incorrect when it pertains to
the concept of species in biology. Prior to his articulation of
descent-with-modification, it was common to say “a lion is
always a lion” because it meets specific criteria for being
included in the category of lions.
We need to realize that there is a vital difference between
(a) philosophical categories of good and bad as they relate
to the functioning of societies, and (b) the dynamic
interactions of effective functionality between human
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 CHAPTER IX.
NGARAKI THE FIERCE.

When Ngaraki had thrown his torch down into the bottomless pit,
there seemed nothing left but the darkness and the silence.
Presently I heard what I judged to be his footsteps hurrying towards
me, and, in my haste to get out of the way, lest by chance he should
touch me, I trod on a loose stone and fell. I was on my feet again in
an instant, and was edging away from the spot, when the chief’s
voice, three paces away, cried, “Ngha! who comes?”
Feeling secure in the impenetrable darkness, I made no reply, but
proceeded to creep silently away towards the foot of the staircase,
listening intently all the while for the tohunga’s movements. But he
was evidently standing stock still. Presently he repeated his
challenge more fiercely, and, receiving no answer, hurried away
towards the end of the gulf.
I felt somewhat relieved at this, as I felt sure I could find the foot of
the staircase, and so get up the pathway; and, if the worst came to
the worst, try the plunge through the aperture in the mountain wall.
But I found it was no easy matter to find my bearings. I could see the
patch of moonlight some distance up the ground floor of the abyss,
and, facing it, knew that the giant statues were behind me. I
proceeded to feel my way from statue to statue in what I fancied was
the right direction, but I had not gone far in this way when faint
sounds of footsteps around me arrested my attention. I stood still,
and all was silent. A minute passed, and, when I moved on, the fall
of these phantom footsteps on every side again brought me to a
sudden halt. Was this some dreadful nightmare, or was I surrounded
and hemmed in by the minions of Ngaraki? The nervous tension of
this would soon have driven me into raving lunacy. I felt I could not
stand it much longer, and tried to steal away quietly on tiptoe, but the
footsteps followed me and I stopped again.
To put an end to this nightmare I thought the best thing I could do
was to kill someone and make a rush. I took my revolver from my
pocket, but merely went through the motion of shooting men down
on every hand just to relieve my nervous tension. After reflection I
did not dare waste a shot in the darkness, for I might want the whole
six later on, and I had left my ammunition outside the mountain; so I
tried to take things quietly. While in the midst of this, something, not
three paces away, collided with something else. “Kuk, kuk!” said a
throat, and another throat answered with a guttural, purring noise,
followed by a long-drawn sigh. After that there was a silence, in
which I was sorely tempted to shoot in the direction of those sounds.
Presently, however, under a further development of the situation, I
thought it was my wisest course to spend at least one of my six
bullets. Standing under cover of the darkness, but haunted by these
ghostly footsteps, I saw, twenty yards on my right, a dim glow. As
soon as this caught my eye I knew what was going to happen.
Somebody was blowing a piece of smouldering dry punk into a
blaze; a torch, or several torches, would be lighted, and I would be
hunted out like a rat. I was determined that this should not be if I
could possibly help it. I much preferred the dark and the ghostly
footsteps. Now the punk was glowing red, and, just above it, the
wizened face of someone blowing it appeared distinctly. I could not
bring myself to the idea of potting at this man out of the dark; it
seemed a little unfair; so, moving about again, I listened for the
footsteps and fired into the thick of them.
The effect was magical. The report rang up through the abyss and
reverberated with a thousand echoes in the high galleries above. But
this was not the only effect. Immediately following the shot there
arose a guttural, inarticulate howl, and a strange clucking noise
began all around. It suddenly dawned on me that these sounds
came from men who had lost their tongues: these were no doubt the
speechless men Te Makawawa had spoken of. But I did not stop to
find out any more about them. Taking advantage of the general
confusion, I felt my way to the last stone figure in the semicircle, and,
with a guess at the position of the foot of the staircase, struck out to
find it.
I could now hear no footsteps about me, and thought that if I could
only get up out of the abyss I should feel happier. After proceeding
some twelve or fifteen paces, I touched a rock and felt my way along
it until I came to a corner. A sigh of relief escaped me at the
discovery that it was the lowest step of the giants’ staircase. I was
just about to mount it when a peculiar guttural “Kuk, kuk!” came like
a challenge out of the darkness five feet away on the left. My first
impulse was to spring towards the sound and get at the throat from
which it proceeded. But suddenly I remembered having heard this
sound answered by a kind of guttural purring. It was evidently the
tongueless challenge equivalent to “Who goes there?” Why should I
not give the answer? On the spur of the moment I did so, making the
most guttural purr I could find in my throat, and following it up with a
long-drawn sigh. It was met with silence. My challenger evidently
took me for a friend who, actuated by a cleverness equal to his own,
had conceived the idea of guarding the only way out of the abyss.
It was with a conceited feeling that I was infinitely cleverer than all
of them that I mounted the step and listened before groping my way
upwards. There was still confusion in the abyss. To judge by the
excited noises I heard, someone had evidently been touched by my
revolver shot. There was no sign of the glowing punk, and I gathered
from this that in the presence of firearms they felt safer in the
darkness. That they stood in fear of another shot was also evident
from the fact that gradually the strange sounds ceased, and all was
quiet.
Presently I heard footsteps hurrying towards me. They were those
of other clever mutes who wished to prevent my escaping that way. I
was the first to give the peculiar challenge, which was answered by a
purring and a ghostly chorus of sighs from several throats. Then,
feeling that I had hoodwinked them, I ventured to creep away as
silently as possible, raising myself from step to step. Several times I
stopped to listen, but all was quiet behind me and I went on and on,
up towards the giants’ window.
It must have been nearly an hour before I gained the approaches
to the huge grating. When I reached it I stood for a moment looking
up at the moon, then, turning, I followed the bright ray through the
darkness until it fell upon the floor of the abyss, a patch of light
considerably less in area than an hour ago. It had travelled nearly
the whole length of the gulf.
 While I was looking at it before passing on I heard a chorus of
guttural sounds far down. I started and moved away, as it dawned
upon me that my tell-tale shadow had been seen on that patch of
light below. My cleverness now oozed out at the back of my head
and ran down into my heels. In a very short space of time I knew I
should have those phantom footsteps about me again.
My first idea was to stand in the dark and shoot them down as
they came past the window in the moonlight, but on second thoughts
I saw that I could only dispose of five in this way at the very most,
and there were certainly more than a dozen of them, besides
Ngaraki himself. Everything considered, I thought it the best plan to
make for the lake and try the opening.
Another ten minutes, then, found me nearing the buttress. My
eyes were continually on the moonlit window, for my pursuers must
pass there, and I was anxious to count them as they passed. But it
was not until I reached the rocks of the buttress that I saw the first
rush quickly across the light. Another followed and another, until I
counted ten. It was an uncomfortable number, especially as they
knew every inch of the place and I did not. So well, indeed, did they
know their way that I had scarcely reached the ledge beneath the
spar when I heard them coming round the corner of the buttress. I
had my hand on the wooden sprit above my head when they were
almost upon me. That they would search every nook and corner I
knew well, and if I could not reach the other side of the lake first I
should have to fire my remaining shots, and, plunging in, run the risk
of being swept down by the overflow into the abyss. Why should I
not cross by the spar? They would never think of that.
No sooner had I conceived this plan, which was as good as any
other, than I bore my weight on the sprit, and found that, although
there was a trembling motion, the balance of the spar was
maintained. In another second I had raised myself by the “one-
legged-doctor” trick everybody learns at school, and was lying along
it.
Scarcely had I accomplished this when I heard the sound of
footsteps below, and someone touched the end of the sprit, for I felt
it tremble beneath me. At this I grasped the points of the granite to
which it was lashed, and drawing myself along, sat up astride of the
thing. I was now well over the brink of the abyss, and began to feel
clever again as the pattering of footsteps went by behind me. By
their movements to and fro I could hear that they were searching for
me, and I did not dare move further lest I should attract attention. To
make up for the absence of their tongues their ears were
preternaturally acute, and the slightest movement might have
betrayed me. Even when the sound of footsteps ceased I remained
motionless for a long time, fearing that there was someone listening
near by in the darkness. If the cascade had still been pouring down
from above I should have stood a better chance under cover of the
sound. Everybody knows the peculiar effect that listening in the
darkness has upon one. The muscles become rigid, the throat grows
dry, an irresistible desire to swallow produces in the act a peculiar
noise, and a strange kind of hypnotism suggests to the limbs that
they cannot move. To this add a cold perspiration, born of the idea
that there is a vast yawning pit beneath one, and a score of ears
listening for the slightest sound near by, and you have my sensations
within a little.
How long I sat there astride of that sprit I do not know, but at
length my feelings became unbearable. I determined to move, but it
cost me all it costs one in a nightmare to make a start. With a harsh,
inward laugh, that sounded almost hysterical in my mental ears, I at
last succeeded in throwing off this strange self-hypnotism, and,
stretching my hands forward, grasped a point of rock on the spar
itself. Once having pulled myself on to the granite I felt more
confidence, and, though the long lever quivered beneath me, I sat
astride and worked my way along. I tried to shut out the terrible
abyss beneath me, but the knowledge that it was there in the
darkness was perhaps worse than if it had been visible to physical
eyes. It was like dangling between life and death. But, as the Maori
mystic saying runs,
“Cling to Life in the light—cling to Life in the darkness!” And I
clung.
After what seemed several hours, although most probably it was
something like fifteen minutes as clocks go, I reached the constricted
part of the spar, and felt that it was not much thicker than a man’s
body. As I rested on it for awhile I felt the drip of water from the roof
of the cavern, falling now on my bush hat and now on my shoulders.
I wondered how many thousand years it had taken that dripping
water to wear the granite down to its present shape, and how many
more would elapse before the spar gave way at this point, and the
two fragments, with the great round stone, go hurtling down through
space on to the heads of the Vile Tohungas far below. I feared that I
would get there first.
A glance along the gulf towards the giants’ window showed me
that it must be now midnight, if not more, for the moon was no longer
shining in between the bars, and I could see her light reflected from
the face of the wall beyond the fissure without. I found fresh courage
in the thought that if I could reach the further lip of the basin and take
the plunge, the rays of the moon shining down into the pool on the
western side of the mountain would serve to guide me towards the
opening.
But my fresh courage soon gave out, for no sooner had I climbed
from the narrow part on to a broader surface of the spar, than the
horror of my situation reacted upon me. Faint with what I had gone
through since my last meal in the early morning, I felt the darkness
beginning to move around me. Concentric rings of light were
converging to a point in my brain. I had just sufficient sense to
spread myself face downwards on the rock before I swooned away.
*****
When I awoke to consciousness the faint light of daybreak was
struggling in through the giants’ window. The vast cavern was full of
greater and lesser darknesses, and, as I peered into these, I recalled
the events of the past night. A sickening horror swept through me as
I realised that I had been lying on a narrow bridge above the abyss
for hours, and it was followed by a feeling of thankfulness that I had
not turned in my deep sleep and rolled down into the depths. I felt as
if angels had stood one on each side of me, and sat up, full of the
conviction that I should see the outer world again.
It was strange that I had not been discovered. Evidently my
pursuers had not thought of my hiding place. But in order to get out
safely it would be necessary to make all haste, for no doubt they
were still keeping watch, and the grey, misty light of the far-off day
was growing every minute. Very soon I should make an easy target
for stones, and if Ngaraki could hit the Vile Tohunga’s eyebrow at
twenty yards with his jade meré, what could he not do with me? To
his way of looking at things there was no telling what secrets I might
carry away with me if I escaped, therefore the sooner I was wiped off
the face of the rock the better for that ancient temple and all it
contained.
As yet it was impossible to see more than a vague suggestion of
one’s hand before one’s face, but in ten minutes’ time there would be
enough light to shoot by. Crawling along the spar towards the basin,
I made all possible haste. I had not gone far before I heard footsteps
several paces in front of me. I stopped, and all was silent. I could
hear my heart beating, and the ghostly whiffle of the descending
torrent immediately beneath, but no other sound.
It was no time for delay. A plan suggested itself to my mind in a
flash, and I acted on it without a second thought. Drawing a match
from my pocket with my left hand and raising my revolver with my
right, I struck the match on the granite and threw it fizzing into the
darkness before me. The light lasted only a second, but in that brief
space I saw two figures crouching on the spar ahead, fired point
blank at the foremost, and saw him roll over into the abyss. The next
instant something whizzed through the air two inches from my
forehead, turning my hat half round upon my head. I knew that
Ngaraki had also taken advantage of the momentary light to hurl his
meré. The involuntary start backwards at this sudden surprise saved
my head again, for, immediately after the missile, came the crashing
sound of a heavy club on the rock a foot before me. This was the
work of the other figure I had seen. Dropping my revolver, I leaned
forward and seized the head of the club with both hands. A struggle
ensued, and each tried to use the club as a means of pushing the
other off the spar. The struggle did not last long. Giving the club a
quick twist from my end, I at the same time pushed it violently
against my antagonist, who made a sound in his throat and fell
backwards, still holding his end of the club. But in doing this I swung
and fell sideways. The next moment we were dangling one on each
side of the spar, with nothing to hold by but the club lying like a
cross-bar over the narrow rock. All this took place in the space of a
few seconds, and it was while I was swaying in the air that I heard
from far below the rattle of Ngaraki’s meré on the floor of the abyss.
Thank Heaven, the mute held on. If he had let go I should have
gone down with him. Never was a man so anxious that his foe
should keep his head.
In moments of danger different people act in widely different ways,
but, in moments of extreme peril, when even fear itself seems
paralysed, most men, I think, would do the right thing automatically.
From what happened I am convinced that the man on the other side
of the rock was doing exactly as I was doing, looking for some point
of rock by which to cling. At all events I felt, by my end of the club,
which I was now holding in one hand, that he was not hanging
quietly. Never were two living beings weighed on a more
extraordinary balance to determine which should be found wanting.
One more second determined it. Failing to find a purchase with one
hand, I had grasped the club with both again and drawn myself up
with my chin over the end of it. Then, to find a good hold on the edge
of the spar, I transferred my right hand while sustaining my weight
with my chin and left arm. Quickly I slid my other hand along the club
till it found the rock. It was done. The club went up as soon as I
released it; there was a guttural exclamation on the other side, and
the sound of clawing fingers on the granite as the man went down
into the pit, leaving me hanging over the side of the spar.
 I drew a long breath and proceeded to raise myself. With chin and
one hand supporting my weight again, I reached forward and swept
the surface of the spar with the other. The first thing I felt was my
revolver, but it was little use to me just then. There was a rough point
near it which would help me, but no sooner had I grasped it than I
had to withdraw my hand, for I could just distinguish a shadowy form
coming towards me from the basin end. I could hear him feeling his
way along, and knew that he was looking for me. I would let him
pass and then climb and shoot everything I met on the rest of my
journey towards the basin. With this end in view, I found the revolver
again, and placing it with difficulty in my coat pocket, got my hand
back on the rock and remained hanging till the one who was looking
for me had passed by.
To find the rough point of rock again was easy, but to draw myself
up with nothing to place my knees or feet against was more difficult.
At length I managed to get one foot up on the spar, and then
gradually dragged my weight on to the upper surface. The light had
grown considerably stronger in the last few minutes. I could now see
the grey surface of the rock before me. By the time I had crawled
twenty feet along the widening surface I could discern the vague
outline of the great round stone above the outer lip of the basin, and
could hear the gritting sound it made as it rolled and rocked slightly
in its socket with the motion of the spar, set up principally by the man
who was looking for me at the other end. I needed only a little more
light in order to stand upright and make a rush.
A full minute I waited, straining my eyes before me to see if there
was anyone barring the way. The spar was now quivering violently,
and I knew the one who had passed me was near the further end.
Another minute passed and the motion grew fainter; he was on his
way back. Presently I heard him crawling along on his hands and
knees not ten yards behind me.
Trusting now to the light, I rose and proceeded carefully towards
the round stone. When I reached it I found no one there, but on the
lip of the basin there were several shadows moving. The foremost,
evidently thinking I was the man who had gone along the spar and
was now returning behind me, gave the guttural challenge. There
was no time to waste in purring, so I gave the countersign with my
revolver. He staggered back and disappeared.
Then all was confused. Vague shadows flitted round the rim of the
basin. I pushed one off into the abyss, another I shot as he came at
me, and he fell into the water. A well-aimed stone carried my hat
from my head back into the abyss, cutting the skin of my scalp to the
bone as it passed. I heard feet pattering behind me and ran on round
the lip of the basin. Now I was facing the place where I knew the
opening in the mountain side lay concealed beneath twenty feet of
water. I had two shots left; the one I fired at something I saw moving
on my left, the other I reserved for the one who was running quickly
round the lip of the basin behind me. Turning, I fired at a distance of
five yards. He did not fall, but uttered a fierce “Ngha!” and came on.
With a quick plunge I leapt from the rock and struck out
downwards into the dark with all my strength. Presently I felt the
current rushing through my fingers. Another vigorous stroke would
have sent me into it, but as I drew up my legs something touched my
foot. I kicked back and encountered what felt like solid flesh. I was
now head and shoulders in the current, and could see a round light
before me, but an arm slid along my leg, a hand closed round my
ankle, and I was dragged forcibly out of it again.
I turned in the water to face my antagonist, whom I now knew to
be Ngaraki himself, and, guiding my hands along his chest and
shoulders, caught him by a bronze pillar for all the impression I could
make on the throat. But I might as well have tried to throttle it. The
next thing I knew was that his hand had closed over my own throat
with a grip like iron. He shook me in the water as if I were a mere rat,
and we rose to the surface.
He still retained his terrible grip as he groped along the bank for
the steps in the wall. By the time he had found them my senses were
beginning to go. I could get no breath until he released my throat,
and it was now nearly half a minute since I drew my last. I was
getting confused, but I remember one thing which made a distinct
impression upon me. My hands, in attempting to get at his own
throat again encountered a small stream of something warm trickling
from his chest, and, strange as it may seem, almost my last feeling
was one of remorse that my final bullet had wounded this strange
man, for whom, notwithstanding all his attempts to kill me, I had
conceived a kind of savage admiration. In my dying condition, lying
helpless in his grip, I seemed to lose my own selfish personality;
and, in that brief moment, looking at things from his standpoint, I
admitted I was in the wrong, and found time to wish at least that I
had not fired that last bullet.
We were now on the margin of the lake swaying about. Suddenly
a low moan escaped his lips. His fingers relaxed. He fell back
against the cavern wall. Before he fell, however, he gave me a
violent push which sent me reeling into the lake.
In the second that elapsed before I reached the water I may have
taken in some air. I do not remember doing so, for I was almost
gone; but I think I must have got some oxygen into my lungs, for, to a
certain extent, consciousness revived as I felt myself going down in
the tumultuous depths. Aided considerably by the water welling up
from the bottom I arrested my descent and darted upwards again,
but on reaching the surface and gasping for air, I found myself in a
current. Oh! horror of horrors! I felt I must be going down into the
abyss. My mother’s sweet, sad face rose in the darkness before me,
and I called on God as all men do in their last extremity. For some
time—I could not say how long—I struggled against that current with
the strength of despair, but, wildly as I strained every nerve and
sinew, I felt I was being gradually sucked in. I reached out to catch
some point of rock, but there was nothing. Then with a feeling of
blackest horror I realised all was over. But the horror gave way, and,
as I swept down, I felt myself smiling up at my mother’s face like a
child dropping off to sleep. There was a stunning crash as my head
struck against some rock in the descent, and then I fell down, down
for ever and ever into the black abyss of unconsciousness.
 CHAPTER X.
KAHIKATEA AND HIS STRANGE BELIEF.

When a man wakes suddenly in the night, he may imagine that the
head of his bed is where the foot should be. When he wakes from a
deep swoon he is willing to admit that he may be anywhere. But
imagine the feelings of a man, whose last recollection was that of
being swept over the brink of an abyss, waking up and finding
himself lying on his back on a mossy bank, with a well-known face
bending over him.
Such was my case, and I thought the whole thing was so
impossible that I gave it up, and, closing my eyes, continued my
downward career through the blackness of darkness, wondering
when the final crash would come.
Again my eyes opened and encountered the face of a friend
between me and the blue sky. A pair of dark brown eyes, anxious
and kind, looked down into mine, and I tried in vain to remember the
name of that friend with the mane of flowing hair and the brown-
bearded face. I knew him so well, but could not place him. After an
effort I gave it up and closed my eyes with a sigh. Really it did not
matter very much, for, just after being shattered on the granite floor
at the far bottom of the abyss, it did not seem to signify what was the
name that belonged to that face. I lapsed again into darkness, and I
can dimly recollect having some such grim, absurd thought as this:
that the fall on the rocks below had scattered my ideas and injured
my brain in some way.
A third time I opened my eyes: the same position, the same face
as before. I began to think there was something in it, and was
prompted to put a question.
“Where am I?”
“Where are you?” replied the deep voice of Kahikatea—I knew him
now—“Why, I hauled you out of the pool nearly half an hour ago. You
came up from the bottom like a piece of limp seaweed. I thought you
were dead at first.”
 “So did I,” I returned wearily. “I thought I had gone down into the
abyss, but it must have been the current through the basin that I was
struggling against in the dark.”
Kahikatea looked down at me with a puzzled expression on his
face, as if he thought I was wandering.
“Don’t talk now, old man,” he said presently. “You’ve a frightful
bruise on the back of your head and a deep cut on the top; you’d
better keep quiet.”
Thus admonished, I lay with my eyes half shut watching him, as
he prepared a bandage to bind up my wounds—the one on the top
and the one on the back, from both of which I could feel the blood
still flowing.
“Now,” he said, when at last I was bandaged with something like a
tenfold turban round what appeared to me a tenfold skull, “shall we
camp here?”
“Rather not,” I returned; “they might see us from above and drop
rocks on us.”
“Very well, but you mustn’t talk.”
With this he placed his hands under me, and, lifting me up easily
in his powerful arms, strode away down the bank of the stream. I
was too weak to protest, and said nothing. At length, coming to a
sequestered spot enclosed in thick bushy foliage, he put me down
gently and set about preparing a soft bed of dry fern. This done, and
myself placed comfortably upon it, with some turfs of dry moss for a
pillow, he lighted a fire and made this strange sick-room in the
wilderness comfortable. I dozed off into a troubled sleep, and when I
awoke my nurse sat by me, and administered a pannikin of hot
broth, the effect of which was invigorating.
The fear that I had killed the fierce but noble tohunga—the
guardian priest of that ancient temple from which I had just escaped
by a miracle—was weighing heavily upon my mind. In a few brief
sentences I told Kahikatea what had occurred within the mountain,
and we considered the question as to whether, if Miriam Grey were
somewhere in that strange place,—and from what I had seen I firmly
believed she was,—she would starve without Ngaraki. We came to
the conclusion that this was improbable, for if anything happened to
Ngaraki, the mutes would no doubt know what to do, for, in an
hereditary priesthood such as this claimed to be, it was not likely that
the order of succession would be dislocated by a sudden death.
Considering these things we concluded that Miriam Grey, if there,
was as safe as ever she had been. But we knew that the way to her
prison far overhead, impossible without a guide at ordinary times,
was even more so now; a strict watch would no doubt be kept; and
‘the way of the fish’ was a difficulty, to say nothing of the ‘way of the
winged fish.’ Accordingly, after well considering the matter, I
determined to follow the aged chief’s advice, and take up the search
of the child, feeling convinced that if she was living I could find her.
For two days and two nights I lay on my bed of dry fern, and was
attended by Kahikatea. By all the laws of medical science, except
perhaps one or two not yet thoroughly laid down, I ought to have had
concussion of the brain, or some such thing, but, strange to say, on
the morning of the third day I awoke perfectly clear in the head, and
with every sign of fever gone.
I determined, however, to accept Kahikatea’s advice and rest for
the remainder of that day and night. We passed the time in telling
each other our adventures and in drawing what conclusions we
could from them. My friend’s search for the ‘way of the spider’ had
not been as successful as my exploration of the ‘way of the fish.’ He
had found the place where on the first occasion the rock had let him
through into a kind of tunnel, and had followed this for a considerable
distance, only to be stopped by a blank wall of rock which had all the
appearance of a rude portcullis let down from the roof.
“From what you have told me of the strange contrivance in the
interior of the mountain below,” he concluded, in relating this part of
his adventures, “I can quite understand that this rock blocking up the
tunnel might have been so contrived by the ancients that it could be
let down and made to close the entrance to the cave from above. I
don’t know how thick it is, but I am going to find means to cut
through it. By the time you have found the child I shall probably have
got through to Miriam Grey—by-the-bye, did you look for the grave
which old Te Makawawa spoke about?”
I had quite forgotten it. “No,” I replied; “I was too busily employed
inside the mountain looking for my own. But now’s our time—let us
make use of it. There’s only one rimu of any size in the ravine; it is
unmistakable.”
“ ‘Beneath the great rimu where the tui sings’—those were the old
chief’s words,” said Kahikatea, as we made our way along the bank
of the river and past the deep pool into the valley, which was shut in
against the mountain wall by the descending spur. There was no
stream running out of the ravine, and the place was carpeted with
moss and kidney ferns, upon which the afternoon sun here and there
got in a smile through some crevice in the foliage overhead. At
length we came to a fairly open moss-grown space around a mighty
vine-laced trunk, which supported the dark green velvety foliage of a
magnificent monarch of the bush.
“Splendid tree,” said Kahikatea, taking off his hat and gazing up at
the fantails and tuis chasing the gnats about its sunlit sides.
“Yes,” said I, the prosaic, “but where is the grave?”
For the next five minutes we were searching in the open space
around the tree. At length I found an inequality beneath the moss,
and with our sheath knives we removed the superficial growth of
fifteen years.
“There has evidently been something buried here,” said Kahikatea,
as we looked at the grave-like ridge, about two feet in length; “if we
find bones, or all that is left of them, old Te Makawawa’s a fraud, and
you and I together will bore and blast a passage through by the ‘way
of the spider;’ but, if on the other hand we find a stone, the old chief
is to be trusted, in which case you must set out to look for Crystal
Grey, and I will bore and blast alone.”
“Unless you will come with me,” I said.
He did not speak for a little while, and I saw he was hesitating.
Then the dreamy look came into his eyes—the look which I knew
meant his strange, mad desire to look into the face of Hinauri, who,
lifeless, but full of meaning, stood praying up there in the forehead of
the mountain.
“No,” he made answer presently. “Crystal Grey is your quest. You
must go alone.”
We were digging into the soft ground with our sheath knives and
scraping out the dirt with our hands. When we were nearly two feet
down my sheath knife grazed upon something hard, and another
minute disclosed the surface of a stone embedded there.
“We’d better get it right out to make sure,” said Kahikatea, and so
we worked away until we had cleared its whole surface. Then, with
the aid of a log for a lever, we hoisted it and placed it upon the moss.
“Without a doubt the old chief is to be trusted,” said Kahikatea.
“Without a doubt,” I rejoined. “There were points that I had made
up my mind to disbelieve. This was one of them. But now I have
verified so much of his story that I am inclined to accept the whole of
it as true. I shall act on the assumption that Crystal Grey is still living,
and I shall search for her.”
We replaced the stone in its grave and covered it up to look as
much as possible the same as before, then found our way back
along the bank of the stream to the camp beneath the mountain wall,
where we spent the remainder of the day and part of the night in
discussing our different undertakings.
Again I put the question to Kahikatea—a question which in after
years I have often pondered as being one which was asked more
wisely than I knew—“Will you not come with me and search for
Crystal Grey?” and again he answered me with the madness of the
poet who, in setting his mind on visionary things, forgets that flesh
and blood is the working basis of all.
“Warnock,” he said, “I have hitched my waggon to a star and I’m
not going to unhitch it now. I have made up my mind to look into the
face of Hinauri, the Daughter of the Dawn, and you would have me
turn aside to help you search for Crystal Grey, the daughter of a
mortal woman. No, my friend, the daughters of mortal women are not
for madmen like me. Warnock!”—he smiled good humouredly at me
—“the mother who freed Hinauri from her age-long prison must be
the mother of a beautiful daughter. I prophesy that, when you have
found the maiden, you will marry her and live happily ever
afterwards.”
“And you?” I asked, smiling back, “you will wed an abstraction and
beget great poems. Now look here, Kahikatea, face the thing
squarely. Suppose, according to the tradition, which was probably
hoary long before Pygmalion and Galatea were thought of—suppose
that Hinauri should become a living, breathing woman, what would
you do?”
He did not answer for some little time, but remained looking
straight before him. At length he gave a sigh and said, “Granting for
the moment that such a thing were possible, Hinauri would be more
to me than she is now. I should love her with my whole self.”
“That is to say, from your present standpoint of the impersonal,
she would be less to you.”
“No, no; the greater includes the less as a part of its greatness.”
“That is to say,” I persisted, pressing him hard, but not against his
will, for two in a solitude speak as brothers; “if she came to life you
would still retain your ideal love for her, but would also give her the
love that a man gives to a woman.”
“Yes, I cannot imagine that it should be otherwise.”
“Well now; I begin to think that you are not in love with an
abstraction after all, but that your feelings stand on a basis
essentially human—founded on the life-likeness of the image—on
that, and on the further romantic tradition that she will return.”
Again he was silent. Then he said slowly, half to himself and half
to me, “The yearning desire upon the face was human, it was living;
the tenderness, the compassion, and that something more—a kind
of sorrow-joy which I could not fathom, filled me with the strange
thought that the stone could feel. I thought—I believe I said it aloud
—‘if brightness would only leap into those eyes, if the raven gloss
would only come upon those tresses, if the laced bosom would only
move with the wonderful emotion of the face, what a glorious woman
would be there.’ As I saw her she seemed to be waiting for a breath
or a touch. One sandalled foot, showing beneath the robe, had been
advanced with the outstretched arms and the other seemed to be in
the act of following, while as yet a little breath of wind had pressed
her robe gently against her. Ah! Warnock, you are right; it was not
the cold stone I saw, but the living woman.”
“And it is that living woman you are in love with,” I concluded.
“Yes, and I am not so mad after all.”
“You would not be if only that woman had a real existence.”
“A real existence?” he said in surprise; “a strong idea will realise
itself somehow. My dear Warnock,”—his voice fell almost to a
whisper, and he spoke with a strange eagerness—“you think me
mad as it is, but at what I am going to say you will think me too far
gone for argument. The idea which, according to tradition, has lived
in the minds of an hereditary priesthood from remote ages, has
taken possession of mine also. I mean the strong belief that Hinauri,
as she is in that stone, will return.”
I looked at him aghast. “Can you give a reason for your belief?”
“None whatever!”
“Then you admit it is contrary to all reason, and yet you believe it.”
“I do not admit it is contrary to all reason; it may be in accord with
some reason of which you and I are ignorant.”
“It seems to me, that there can be no reasonable foundation for
the idea that a stone will suddenly turn into flesh and blood.”
“Yet the idea that was made stone might also be made flesh.”
Kahikatea said these words in deep abstraction. I took small note
of them at the time, though afterwards, when everything was made
clear to me, when my own mind had yielded to nothing less than
ocular demonstration, they were burnt deep into my brain as some of
the truest and sanest words ever uttered. So deep was my friend’s
abstraction that he was unconscious of having thought and spoken.
This was evident, for, starting as if recalled from a deep reverie, he
proceeded to reply to my last remark.
“No,” he said; “it is absurd to believe that a stone can turn into
flesh and blood; yet I believe that Hinauri, the Daughter of the Dawn,
will return. That is my madness, Warnock, and yet it seems so sane
that even now I regard her as a living woman—the only one in the
world for me.”
He rose as he spoke, and knocked his pipe out against the
mountain wall. Turning towards me with a smile, he added: “If your
determination to find Crystal Grey is half as great as mine to reach
the cave where the pure white woman stands, you will find her, and
then—well, I have prophesied what I have prophesied: the woman
who harboured the vision of Hinauri could not have borne an
unlovely child.”
Early on the following morning we left the shadow of the mountain
wall and passed out from the Table Land beneath the red birches
crowned with mistletoe. By Tiki’s guidance we retraced our steps,
and by nightfall again reached the pool beneath the high cliff where
we had witnessed the phenomenon which had so terrified the Maori.
Here we prepared to camp, but when I went to draw water from
the pool to boil the billy, I discovered something which not only threw
an additional light on the inner workings of that temple in the rock
which we had left behind us, but also had the effect of preventing our
camping at that spot. As I was stooping to draw up the water,
something floating on the surface near by attracted my attention.
Taking a dry branch from the bank I fished the object towards me
and held it up.
It was a hat!
I looked at it more closely in the uncertain light and recognised the
article. It was my own hat that had gone down into the abyss in that
terrible fight with Ngaraki and his speechless men in the interior of
the mountain. With my body full of shudders at the thought of what
else had fallen into the abyss on the same occasion, and my head
full of the only possible explanation of this remarkable find, I sought
Kahikatea, and we agreed to move on and camp on the bank of
some tributary stream lower down; which we did.
 CHAPTER XI.
THE SEARCH FOR ‘THE LITTLE MAIDEN.’

On the following morning I parted with Kahikatea, who was going

back to his hut among the mountains, and thence to the nearest
civilised part to procure such things as he required for his
exploration. Tiki and I continued our way south towards the cottage
on the bank of the stream where his band had left the child in Grey’s
care fifteen years before; not that we expected to find Crystal Grey
still there, but for all that it was the right point at which to begin our
search. I may say here that I no longer had any doubts as to whether
the child left there by the Maoris was Miriam Grey’s daughter, and,
as we journeyed along towards the gap between two lines of snow
mountains, I talked with Tiki about her.
“What clothes had she on when you took her south?” I asked.
“A kaitaka of kiwi feathers,” he replied, with a readiness that
assured me he could recall it perfectly. “She also had huia feathers
in her hair, sandals on her feet, and a small heitiki19 hung round her
neck.”
I pictured the little mite as a kind of “pakeha Maori” chieftainess
travelling south in the arms of a band of cannibals, but as safe as,
perhaps even safer than, a well-guarded child in a Christian family,
for was she not under the word of protection of the ariki Te
Makawawa? Under such conditions she might have journeyed
through the Uriwera, entering it in childhood and emerging at
womanhood, without so much as a hair of her head being harmed.
“What was she like to look at?” I asked again.
Tiki made an expressive gesture of admiration with his hands.
“He Pakeha! She was like a rising star. The young wild swan was
not more beautiful. When it was my turn to carry the little maiden I
had strange feelings, and when she looked at me with her dark eyes
a waiariki20 sprang up in my heart—ah! she had the eyes of a witch,
pakeha, but her words were like the sweet hymns of our ancestress
Paré. My heart flies out of my breast, like a bird into the south, to