Ponaturi

The tide off the reef turns strange at the instant the sun goes under. In the old accounts the water begins to move against its own current, and then they come up out of it, a pale crowd climbing the wet sand in their thousands. Their skin is white, or a green-tinged white that seems to hold its own cold light; their hair is red; their long fingers end in claws made for holding and tearing. These are the Ponaturi, and the dark belongs to them.

Their home is a country under the sea, but on the land they keep a great house, and to that house they return every night to sleep. Manawa-Tāne, it was called. Before the whole tribe would go in, they sent a single scout ahead along the shore to walk the road and search the rooms, nose lifted, testing the air for the smell of any enemy lying in wait. Only when he found the place clean would the rest come crowding up from the surf and pack themselves inside until there was no floor left to see, and sleep the sleep of things that fear nothing in the night.

One thing could undo them, and they knew it better than anyone. Daylight was death. A single unshuttered ray falling across that sleeping crowd would wither every one of them where they lay. So they did not trust the dawn to chance. They kept a watcher at the door whose only task was to tell them, through the long hours, whether the night still held.

That watcher was a stolen woman. The Ponaturi had killed a man named Hema and carried off his body, hanging his bones up inside Manawa-Tāne beneath the high slope of the roof. His wife, Urutonga, they kept alive for her usefulness. They set her at the threshold and named her Tatau, which means Door, and all night they would call to her, Ho, Tatau, is it dawn yet, and all night she would answer that it was deep night, lasting night, still night, and that they should sleep on.

Hema had two sons. Tāwhaki and his younger brother Karihi came at last within sight of the house, and as they approached Tāwhaki began to chant. Inside, the dead man’s bones heard it and rattled against the roof-beam for gladness, because they understood that the hour of revenge had come. The brothers wept with their mother at the door, and she begged them to flee, for the race that lived here was savage beyond anything. They would not go. They climbed instead into the thick reed thatch of the roof, cut hollows in it, and hid, invisible by their own incantations, while the light drained out of the sky.

The scout came first, as always, and at the threshold he caught it: the scent of living men. He raised his nose and turned, sniffing through the house, a breath away from finding them. Then the whole tribe came pouring up behind him, careless from long safety, thousands pressing in through the door at once, and in that flood of bodies the smell of the two men was simply lost. The Ponaturi filled the house and settled and slept.

At midnight the brothers slipped down. Their mother met them at the door, and they whispered together about how the thing should be done, and she told them plainly: let the sun kill them. So as the sky began to pale, Tāwhaki and Karihi stopped every crack and every chink around the door and the window, sealing the house against the coming light, while inside the old men of the Ponaturi called out again and again to ask if it was morning, and Tatau answered again and again that it was still night. She held the lie until the sun stood well up and burned bright over the land. Then she called to her sons to pull the stoppers free. Light came through the walls in a flood. The whole tribe perished in it, not by any spear or club but simply scorched away where they lay. Sunlight did what no weapon could.

When it was finished the brothers took down their father’s bones and burned them, along with the withered ruin of everyone in the house, and carried their mother home. One creature is said to have escaped. A grey mullet, a kanae, had come ashore with the Ponaturi that night, and when the killing light poured in it flung itself across the floor in leap after leap, out the door and down the sand, springing back into the safety of the sea.

The Ponaturi were not finished with the living after that. They surface again in the story of Rātā, and again as thieves of a dead father’s bones, which they use to beat time while they work their magic and recite their spells. Rātā hides close enough to steal the incantations out of their own mouths, learns a stronger one called Titikura, and turns it against them, killing their priests, taking back the bones, and cutting down a thousand of the horde when they come after him. It is the same shape of story twice over: a hero, a robbed grave, and a sea-people who are terrible in the dark and helpless once the trick is turned.

Where they came from, the stories do not really say. The Ponaturi are simply there, a race out of the water, kin in menace to the other uncanny pale folk of these islands, the patupaiarehe of the mountain mist and the sea-hordes of Tangaroa. Their strength was in their numbers, in the ocean country that no living person could follow them into, and in the plain fact that they owned the night. Their weakness was written into the same nature. A people who cannot bear the sun must always be guessing at the dawn, and a people who must guess can be lied to. Everything the Ponaturi feared arrived, in the end, through a door they themselves had set a prisoner to guard.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the Ponaturi in Māori mythology?

The Ponaturi are a race of hostile sea-dwelling goblins in Māori tradition who live in a country beneath the waters and come ashore each night to sleep in a great house on land. They are pale, red-haired beings with clawed fingers, and daylight is fatal to them. They are remembered chiefly as the murderers of Hema and as bone-stealing enemies of heroes like Tāwhaki and Rātā.

Why is sunlight fatal to the Ponaturi?

Sunlight destroys the Ponaturi utterly: a single ray falling on them causes them to wither and die where they lie. Because of this, they live underwater by day and sleep on land only in darkness, and they keep a watcher at the door of their house to warn them of the coming dawn. This total vulnerability to light is the key to their defeat in the myth of Tāwhaki.

How were the Ponaturi defeated by Tāwhaki?

Tāwhaki and his brother Karihi hid in the thatch of the Ponaturi’s house, Manawa-Tāne, where their captive mother Urutonga was forced to serve as doorkeeper. They sealed every crack in the house so no light could enter, and had Urutonga keep telling the Ponaturi it was still night long after the sun had risen. When the brothers finally pulled the coverings free, daylight flooded in and killed the entire tribe at once.

What was the house Manawa-Tāne?

Manawa-Tāne was the large house on dry land where the Ponaturi returned each night to sleep, even though their true home lay beneath the sea. Inside it they hung the bones of the murdered Hema beneath the roof, and they forced Hema’s widow Urutonga to sit at its door as a night-watcher, renaming her Tatau, meaning Door. The house became the site of their destruction when Tāwhaki used its own sealed walls to trap the daylight out until the fatal moment.

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