Pool of Mirrors

‘THE HIDDEN VALLEY’, said the sign, ‘5km’. An enormous arrow pointed the way. Anna found that amusing. I stopped the car to take a photograph of her — inscrutably womanly in crop top and striped track pants — pulling herself up on taut fingers from its framework.

We were half an hour north of Taupo on the shores of Lake Ohakuri. It was like driving through Tolkien’s Middle Earth; winding between rounded hills of snooker-table-green to the Hidden Valley where we found the Ruatapu Cave.

Although midsummer, the air was chilly; the day sullen and overcast. Occasionally, drizzle dampened our faces and left a sheen on our hair. Not many other tourists had found it: dynamic American couples in partner-look track suits; a fair-skinned Scandinavian family who spoke in guttural tongue-twisters; and a group of Japanese holidaymakers with several thousand dollars worth of camera equipment.

We were ferried across the lake from a jetty next to the souvenir shop. A young Maori with an amiable disposition and a curly halo of hair steered the throbbing boat, sitting on the gunwales with bare feet on the engine housing, as though he had been doing this all his life.

“I’m David and I’ll be your guide today,” he said when we reached the far side. The atmosphere was pungent with sulphur.

He guided us around bubbling mud pools, alongside terraces of silica that seemed to have cascaded down in a cataract and frozen as it spilled into the lake. “The Maori name of this hidden valley translates as ‘the white place of adorning’. Ruatapu means ‘Sacred hole’ in Maori,” said David, punctuated by sputtering mud.

“This sacred hole was tapu to males until around 1900. Before that, only females were allowed in. They bathed in the cave and adorned themselves for ceremonial occasions.” David threw Anna a knowing smile. I got the feeling they were flirting with each another but I made a big thing of saying nothing.

The cave mouth was fringed with ferns, obscured by bush. A subterranean silence swelled from within it, engulfing us. Several flights of wooden steps zigzagged down to a bright, fathomless pool. At the bottom of the first flight a modest slate plaque bore this inscription:

Waiho te riri me te kino muri
Leave war and strife behind you
Erected in memory of Abel Witiana. His spirit hovers
in this lovely cave where, as a lad, he guided delighted
visitors with his manly bearing. He rests in the far
Libyan desert, killed in action 1941, aged 22 years.
Placed in 1945.

Each tourist stopped to look at this. Without fail, they stood before the plaque far longer than it would have taken for them to read the inscription. Afterwards, the silence was even more disconcerting.

The cave walls and roof were of midnight blue, emerald green, pinkish-coral and pastel purple, blended like colours on a palette. The pool of mirrors, Waiwhakaata, lay beneath, serenely pregnant as a wishing-well.

When we reached the flat rock between pool and steps, David began to speak, softly.

“A princess of the Ngati Tahu Tribe, Te Rahui, once lived at the Hidden Valley,” he said. “Now, there is a story about Rehu, from Matata. He heard about Te Rahui’s legendary beauty.”

From above, the palms around the cave mouth rustled as though they were hushing us. Looking up towards the light was like gazing into the land that time forgot.

“One day,” said David, “Rahui went to bathe in the pool of mirrors.” From where we stood we could see the roof of the cave reflected in the pool, which sent flickering highlights back onto the roof.

“Rehu watched Rahui paddling her canoe. The river was in flood and there were rapids downstream, but he was brave, so he swam after her. He followed her through the scrub, watched her cross the boiling mud holes, reach solid ground and disappear into the cave. If Rehu had strayed he’d have fallen in the boiling mud, but he followed in Rahui’s footsteps and was safe. Through the cave’s mouth he looked down on her bathing in the pool with the blue, green, red and purple of the roof reflected around her.” The Americans whispered, watching in awe as David made the patterns shimmering on the cave roof come alive.

“He watched her until she swam to a ledge and lay resting in the rising steam. Rehu walked down to the pool’s edge. He crouched and spoke to her across the water, but Rahui turned away and would not talk to him. So Rehu swam across the pool and placed his hand on her ledge. She prised his fingers off and Rehu sank back into the water. When he rose he grasped the ledge, trying to climb up alongside her. Again, the girl pushed him back in. This happened twelve times. Rehu tried to grab onto her, but his breath was coming in gasps and he went under for the last time.”

David paused while the Japanese took photographs. He looked at each of us in turn, as though making sure we were ready for the final scene. When everyone was paying attention, he grinned and continued, fingers patiently enmeshed.

“Te Rahui cried out and jumped in after Rehu. The girl was at the bottom of the pool before she found him. She pulled Rehu up to the surface, laid him on the ledge and rested his head on her lap. His eyes were closed and he didn’t speak. Rahui cried, thinking Rehu was dead. She tried every way she could to bring him back to life...” An outburst of sniggering wormed its way among the tourists and David paused before simply raising a hand and continuing the story.

“At last he opened his eyes. Rahui cried with joy. Maybe he wasn’t as close to death as Rahui thought, maybe he was. Anyway, Rehu clasped his arms around her... and Rahui was his.”

“Was it something about the pool of mirrors that nearly drowned him?” Anna asked, as I took a backwards step.

“Well,” said David, “the vapours are strong. You could be overpowered by them if you’re not careful — and it’s deeper than it looks.” Gradually, his melodious voice began to fade. Guides the world over have this effect on me; in museums, galleries and on bus tours of capital cities. It wasn’t David’s fault, it’s a thankless task, capturing my attention. I rub the gloss off even the shiniest tale.

As if to insure against tourists like me, David had developed a habit of beginning most sentences with an emphatic, “Now.” Perhaps he was merely wrenching himself back from being overpowered by those heady vapours. In any case, after a while, I heard only, “Now... Now... Now...”

From this actuality, my consciousness drifted in the direction of the pool.

I found myself drawn to the water and the flickering cave roof. The air was charged with sulphur. I felt light-headed.

Close up, it didn’t look deep. I thought of ancient ceremonies, dusky maidens adorning themselves, the sound of trickling water, a cloak of rising steam...

Looking down into the pool I had a momentary sense of being subjected to an optical illusion — as though I was looking at my backwards reflection in a second mirror — thinking to move my hand one way but instead seeing it go the other. It wasn’t my own face that I saw reflected. It was the face of a dark man with cropped hair, wearing a pale green, open-necked shirt.

I leaned over, thinking I must be looking into the pool from a strange angle. The rocks were slippery and I pitched forward, stumbling in up to my knees. The water wasn’t hot enough to scald me — it was my own clumsiness at which I gasped.

I caught glimpse of something, off to one side, through rising steam; the top of a head, I thought, long hair on the surface of the water, the pearly sheen of wet skin...

From across the cave someone called out, “Abel! Come back!” The voice of a young woman, distinct and imploring.

I put out a hand to support myself, catching my left palm on a submerged rock. This gave me a raw graze seasoned with grit and cause for an ancient Anglo-Saxon curse. The wound took weeks to heal but the broad silver ring I was wearing on my middle finger began gleaming in a way it hadn’t done since Anna had bought it for me.

I turned to face bewildered tourists and Anna, sniggering, one hand cupped over her face. There was more to the story, she told me later. Another suitor, Tarata, came to challenge Rehu for Rahui’s hand. David was adding this postscript when I stepped back in the direction of the group; my hand smarting, my boots dripping and my face sizzling with embarrassment.

We made our way up the steps, led by David. At the top, he turned to us, smiling. He was silhouetted against a backdrop of palm frond stars and a grey brightness of sky. Then he began to speak:

“There is a spirit within this cave
that other lands must lack,
a living grace, a speaking voice
that beckons fancy back.”

That poem, he said, had been found on a sign at the cave, thirty years before. It had gone now. Anna asked who wrote the words. David wasn’t sure.

At the souvenir shop, in a glossy leaflet about the Ruatapu Cave, was written: “Put your left hand in the pool of mirrors and make a wish. Provided no one else knows what you wished for, it is guaranteed to come true.”

Too late now. This sounded like a tradition invented for the tourists so, in a way, I was glad I had cursed as my hand went into the pool.

*

I lay awake that night in the darkened motel room. I didn’t think about long-tailed bats (which roost, the leaflet said, in Ruatapu), the pervasive smell of sulphur, the alum in the pool and its capacity for cleaning jewellery, or the frozen flow of silica to the lakeside. I thought about that poem. What must it be like to lie dying, thousands of miles from home in the desert of someone else’s war, with only your fancy to send you home?

*

Less than a week later the holidays were over and I was back in the old routine, looking for work and desperately trying to keep my head up while treading water.

Anna had gone back to working as aerobics trainer at our local gym. “Don’t give up,” she said. “You’re not sunk yet. Whatever happens I love you.” She maintained that she was strong enough for both of us, and probably was strong enough for three. I saw our relationship mirrored in the story of Rehu and Te Rahui — which would have buoyed me up, except that I’d been expecting replies to some job applications I’d sent out.

Instead, Anna got a letter — from overseas.

Clearly addressed to her, the handwriting on it was old-fashioned, in blue-black ink. The airmail stripes around the envelope were of a special quality and the paper unusually substantial. Instead of postage stamps, an inexplicable postmark: Allied GHQ Middle East, Cairo Sorting Office, August 1941.

The envelope was in our mailbox between the bills and bank statements and junk mail.

In it, a photograph; not faded, but with a sepia tint. It was of a group of men in battle-dress at an oasis, palm trees and sand in the background. They seemed to form an audience — most were looking at something beyond the frame, not at the camera lens. There were Maoris in clusters among them. The head of one, about three rows back, had been circled in smudged ink; a firm-chinned, brawny man. He wore shorts, dusty desert boots and a cap tilted jauntily on his head.

On the back of the photograph, someone had written, in the same script as on the envelope: “Me and me mates watching the Kiwi Concert Party, Egypt, March 1941.”

The letter filled nearly three pages of pale blue notepaper. “Dear Anna,” it began. “You would hardly believe it, but sometimes the desert can be a beautiful place. It is silent like nowhere else and just after dawn or at dusk the dunes throw cool shadows.” He wrote to her of dust-storms and heat-stroke; of thundering field guns; of screaming schrapnel and lost mates.

The letter was signed, “With love, Abel Witiana.”

*

Anna was open with me. She had no idea who could have sent her a fifty-six-year-old letter. She treated the matter with humour. I think she believed it was part of some elaborate practical joke I’d organised. “How do you explain something like that?” she said with a wry smile.

I wondered whether there had been a little more than flirting between her and David, but the details didn’t add up to that kind of deception. We hadn’t spoken much about the plaque at the Hidden Valley but it was clear that something had happened in the Ruatapu Cave that changed things between us.

Other letters followed. Abel told her how the members of the Maori Battalion were renowned for their bayonet attacks. They punched holes through even the strongest German entrenchments. As weeks and months passed, he wrote about the Hygiene Section ensnaring flies, about sandstorms and the provocative messages the German troops left for them as they retreated.

The details of war seemed distant.

In a letter dated November 14th, 1941, Abel wrote that the British 8th Army had begun a Libyan offensive and the New Zealand Division had attacked Italian garrisons across the frontier. Desert battle conditions became even more challenging and chaotic than they had already been. “The night of November 17th was one of the worst,” he said. “We saw flashes of lightning along the coast all night. The RAF dropped its parachutists wide of their target because of bad weather and the men, when they landed, had to deal with wind, rain and mud...”

Abel’s company had been sent along the coast towards Tobruk. After a struggle, they managed to rendezvous with the city’s defenders. But Rommel’s German Panzer divisions had moved towards the Egyptian frontier and swept back along the New Zealand line.

*

Abel’s final letter to Anna consisted of just one page. “The German tanks were close yesterday evening,” he wrote. “It was bitter cold and there was heavy machine gun and mortar fire all around us. The camp was ablaze with flying metal. We carried away our wounded wrapped in blankets. Fifty eight of our men were killed and there’s no sign of an end to it.”

He need not have looked for a sign.

Anna and I stepped back in time, holding hands like young lovers at a desk in the local library, delving into the history of the Long Range Desert Group during the North Africa War. Anna shed tears as she read about what had happened on the 30th November 1941, when the 15th Panzer Division closed-in on the New Zealand Division in the Tobruk corridor.

A brigade headquarters, the main medical station, three infantry battalions and an artillery regiment were lost. The beleaguered New Zealand Division withdrew to the Egyptian frontier. Nearly a quarter of its soldiers had been killed, wounded or taken prisoner.

No telegram came to inform us that Abel Witiana had fallen. The letters stopped, no reasonable explanation presented itself.

That seemed to be an end to it.

*

A desert dream under a vast yellow moon. Leaning into a wailing wind. Sand everywhere; burning my face, coating my mouth and tongue, stinging my eyes, whipping every inch of my exposed skin. My feet sinking, legs gradually swallowed, then totally enveloped, choking, drowning in sand.

*

I woke suddenly with a fierce thirst.

At the foot of my bed, in front of the window, was an unfamiliar shape. In that waking instant, it looked as though something had been left hanging from the curtain rail. I blinked, trying either to focus on it or make it disappear. The image sharpened until it took the form of a lunging Maori infantryman, his cap at an angle on the curve of his skull, his chin and his bayonet jutting towards me.

I was looking down the barrel of a bolt-action rifle.

It was no more than a hallucination, I told myself, an irritation of the optic nerve. Anna lay next to me breathing deeply and soundly asleep. The infantryman was real for but a moment — when I looked back, he had gone.

I was left with the echoes of David’s voice saying over and over, “Now... now... now...”

*

I’ve never seen military service and cannot begin to comprehend what Abel Witiana went through in the Libyan desert as a twenty-two year old. I’m thirty eight now and most days I feel as helpless as a child.

Since the letters stopped, I have tried getting on with my life, maintaining a positive attitude and not feeling sorry for myself. It isn’t easy. It never was. But Anna was right: I haven’t sunk yet.

When positive thinking fails me, I study the photograph of that concert party audience. Anna attached it to her dressing-table mirror. In it, Abel looks full of living grace — as though the world is at his feet.

He died only months after it was taken. The speaking voice had implored in vain. He might not, as a man, have been able to leave war and strife behind him but I had seen signs that something more ancient had.

I saw it reflected in my own image, in a pool of mirrors at the Ruatapu Cave in the Hidden Valley.

 —0O0—

(Pool of Mirrors is previously unpublished in print.)