The Luminaries

paper,’ Tauwhare said. He tossedthe paper down onto the desk, somewhat rudely, so that it skidded over Löwenthal’s forme.
    ‘Certainly,’ said Löwenthal, with disapproval. He reached for his pencil. ‘Do you have an advertisement prepared?’
    ‘“Maori guide, very experienced, fluent in English, locally knowledgeable, offers services to surveyors, diggers, explorers and the like. Success and safety guaranteed.”’
    ‘Surveyors, diggers, explorers,’ repeated Löwenthal, as he wrote. ‘Success and safety. Yes, very good. And then I’ll put your name, shall I?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘I’ll need an address as well. Are you stopping off in town?’
    Tauwhare hesitated. He had planned to return to the Arahura Valley that night, and spend the night in Crosbie Wells’s deserted cottage; he did not wish to disclose this fact to Löwenthal, however, given Löwenthal’s close acquaintance with Edgar Clinch, the man to whom the dwelling now legally belonged.
    Edgar Clinch had been the frequent object of Tauwhare’s meditations ever since the assembly at the Crown Hotel three weeks ago, for despite all the transactions between Maori and Pakeha that had occurred over the past decade, Te Rau Tauwhare still looked upon the Arahura Valley as his own, and he was made very angry whenever any tract of Te Tai Poutini land was bought for profit rather than for use. As far as Tauwhare knew, Clinch had not spent any length of time in the Arahura prior to the sale; since the purchase , he had not even troubled himself to walk the perimeter of the acreage that now belonged to him by law. What had been the point of the purchase? Did Clinch mean to settle there? Did he mean to till the soil? Fell the native timbers? Dam the river? Drop a shaft, perhaps, and mine for gold? Certainly he had not done a thing to Crosbie’s cottage beyond stripping it of all that he could sell—and even that he had done by proxy. It was a hollow dividend that required no skill, no love, and no hours of patient industry: such a dividend could only be wasted, for it was borne from waste, and to waste it would return. Tauwhare could not respect a man who treated land as though it was just another kind of currency.Land could not be minted! Land could only be lived upon, and loved.
    In this Te Rau Tauwhare was no hypocrite. He had travelled every inch of the West Coast, on foot, by cart, on horseback, and by canoe. He could picture the entire length of it, as though upon a richly illustrated map: in the far north, Mohikinui and Karamea, where the mosses were fat and damp, where the leaves were waxy, where the bush was an earthy-smelling tangle, where the Nikau fronds, shed from the trunks of the palms, lay upon the ground as huge and heavy as the flukes of whales; further south, the bronze lacquer of the Taramakau, the crenulated towers at Punakaiki, the marshy flats north of Hokitika, always crawling with the smoky mist of not-quite-rain; then the cradled lakes; then the silent valleys , thick with green; then the twisting flanks of the glaciers, rippled blue and grey; then the comb of the high Alps; then, at last, Okahu and Mahitahi in the far South—wide, shingled beaches littered with the bones of mighty trees, where the surf was a ceaseless battery, and the wind a ceaseless roar. After Okahu the coastline became sheer and impassable. Beyond it, Tauwhare knew, lay the deep waterways of the southern fjords, where the sun set early behind the sudden peaks, so that the water took on the blackened look of tarnished silver, and the shadows pooled like oil. Tauwhare had never seen Piopiotahi, but he had heard tell of it, and he loved it because it was Te Tai Poutini land.
    Thus the ribbon of the Coast—and there at the heart of it all, the Arahura River,
taonga, wahi tapu, he matahiapo i te iwi
! If the Arahura was Tauwhare’s equator, dividing the land of Te Tai Poutini into halves, then Crosbie’s cottage, situated in the valley more or less halfway between the mountains and the ocean, was his meridian. And yet he could not claim it; his hapu could not claim it; his iwi could not claim it. Before Crosbie Wells’s body had been committed to the ground, those hundred rolling acres in the Arahura Valley had been purchased by a profit-hungry Pakeha, who had sworn, upon his honour, that he had come by the land honestly: there had been no foul play of any kind, he had said, and he certainly had not broken any laws.
    ‘A hotel?’ said Löwenthal.