Toke-rau was the windward side of the island and also its rainy side. On the opposite side of the land the mountain tops had robbed the moisture from the air and drought (desert) was the rule. The moisture had deserted the air. ... The word lau, in the sense of expanse, and hence 'the sea, ocean', is not now used in the Polynesian dialects. There remain, however, two compound forms to indicate its former use in that sense: lau-make, Haw., lit. the abating or subsiding of water, i.e., drought; rau-mate, Tah., to cease from rain, be fair weather; rau-mate, N. Zeal., id., hence summer.
... Hamiora Pio once spoke as follows to the writer: 'Friend! Let me tell of the offspring of Tangaroa-akiukiu, whose two daughters were Hine-raumati (the Summer Maid - personified form of summer) and Hine-takurua (the Winter Maid - personification of winter), both of whom where taken to wife by the sun ... Now, these women had different homes. Hine-takurua lived with her elder Tangaroa (a sea being - origin and personified form of fish). Her labours were connected with Tangaroa - that is, with fish. Hine-raumati dwelt on land, where she cultivated food products, and attended to the taking of game and forest products, all such things connected with Tane ... The other word is koo-lau, Haw., kona-rau, N. Zeal., toe-rau, Tah., on the side of the great ocean, the weather side of an island or group; toa-lau, Sam., the north-east trade wind. In Fiji, lau is the name of the windward islands generally. In the Malay and pre-Malay dialects that word in that sense still remains under various forms: laut, lauti, lautan, lauhaha, olat, wolat, medi-laut, all signifying the sea, on the same principle of derivation as the Latin æquor, flat, level, expanse, the sea. Welsh, llav, to expand; lled, breadth. Armor., blad, flat, broad. Lat., latus, broad, wide, spacious. Greek, πλατυς, wide, broad, flat; πλατη, broad surface, blade of an oar; πλακοσ, broad, flat. Pers., lâtû, blade of an oar, oar.Lith., platus, flat. Sanskr., prath, be extended, to spread. Goth., laufs or laubs, a leaf. Icel., laug, bath; lauga, to bathe, lögr, the sea, water, moisture ... Rau was leaf (life) and on the windward side of the island the moisture (rain, sweet water, vai ora) was 'stolen' (robbed, toke) from the air, leaving nothing (kore) for the other side. Kore. To lack, to be missing; without (something normally expected), -less; ana kore te úa, ina he vai when rain lacks there is no water: vî'e kenu kore, woman without a husband, i.e. widowed or abandoned by her husband. Vanaga. Not, without (koe); e kore, no, not; kore no, nothing, zero; kore noa, never, none; hakakore, to annul, to nullify, to annihilate, to abrogate, to acquit, to atone, to expiate, to suppress, a grudge. T Pau.: kore, not, without. Mgv.: kore, nothing, not, without, deprived of; akakore, to destroy, to annihilate. Mq.: kore, koé, óé, nothing, not, finished, done, dead, destroyed, annihilated, without. Ta.: ore, no, not, without. Korega, nothing, naught. Churchill ... In north Asia the common mode of reckoning is in half-year, which are not to be regarded as such but form each one separately the highest unit of time: our informants term them 'winter year' and 'summer year'. Among the Tunguses the former comprises 6½ months, the latter 5, but the year is said to have 13 months; in Kamchatka each contains six months, the winter year beginning in November, the summer year in May; the Gilyaks on the other hand give five months to summer and seven to winter. The Yeneseisk Ostiaks reckon and name only the seven winter months, and not the summer months. This mode of reckoning seems to be a peculiarity of the far north: the Icelanders reckoned in misseri, half-years, not in whole years, and the rune-staves divide the year into a summer and a winter half, beginning on April 14 and October 14 respectively. But in Germany too, when it was desired to denote the whole year, the combined phrase 'winter and summer' was employed, or else equivalent concrete expressions such as 'in bareness and in leaf', 'in straw and in grass' ... ... 'The life-force of the earth is water. God moulded the earth with water. Blood too he made out of water. Even in a stone there is this force, for there is moisture in everything. But if Nummo is water, it also produces copper. When the sky is overcast, the sun's rays may be seen materializing on the misty horizon. These rays, excreted by the spirits, are of copper and are light. They are water too, because they uphold the earth's moisture as it rises. The Pair excrete light, because they are also light ... 'The sun's rays,' he went on, 'are fire and the Nummo's excrement. It is the rays which give the sun its strength. It is the Nummo who gives life to this star, for the sun is in some sort a star.' It was difficult to get him to explain what he meant by this obscure statement. The Nazarene made more than one fruitless effort to understand this part of the cosmogony; he could not discover any chink or crack through which to apprehend its meaning. He was moreover confronted with identifications which no European, that is, no average rational European, could admit. He felt himself humiliated, though not disagreeably so, at finding that his informant regarded fire and water as complementary, and not as opposites. The rays of light and heat draw the water up, and also cause it to descend again in the form of rain. That is all to the good. The movement created by this coming and going is a good thing. By means of the rays the Nummo draws out, and gives back the life-force. This movement indeed makes life. The old man realized that he was now at a critical point. If the Nazarene did not understand this business of coming and going, he would not understand anything else. He wanted to say that what made life was not so much force as the movement of forces. He reverted to the idea of a universal shuttle service. 'The rays drink up the little waters of the earth, the shallow pools, making them rise, and then descend again in rain.' Then, leaving aside the question of water, he summed up his argument: 'To draw up and then return what one had drawn - that is the life of the world.' If sweet water and fire are basically the same, then our frame of reference has to ezpand. And as a consequence we will then perceive additional meaning in the myth of when the Smith stole the Fire:
... All was now ready for departure except that there was no fire in the smithy. The ancestor slipped into the workshop of the great Nummo, who are Heaven's smiths, and stole a piece of the sun in the form of live embers and white-hot iron. He seized it by means of a 'robber's stick' the crook of which ended in a slit, open like a mouth. He dropped some of the embers, came back to pick them up, and fled towards the granary;
but his agitation was such that he could no longer find the entrances. He made the round of it several times before he found the steps and climbed onto the flat roof, where he hid the stolen goods in one of the skins of the bellows, exclaiming: 'Gouyo!', which is to say. 'Stolen!'. The word is still part of the language, and means 'granary'. It is a reminder that without the fire of the smithy and the iron of hoes there would be no crops to store ... ... During his descent the ancestor still possessed the quality of a water spirit, and his body, though preserving its human appearance, owing to its being that of a regenerated man, was equipped with four flexible limbs like serpents after the pattern of the arms of the Great Nummo. The ground was rapidly approaching. The ancestor was still standing, his arms in front of him and the hammer and anvil hanging across his limbs. The shock of his final impact on the earth when he came to the end of the rainbow, scattered in a cloud of dust the animals, vegetables and men disposed on the steps. When calm was restored, the smith was still on the roof, standing erect facing towards the north, his tools still in the same position. But in the shock of landing the hammer and the anvil had broken his arms and legs at the level of elbows and knees, which he did not have before. He thus acquired the joints proper to the new human form, which was to spread over the earth and to devote itself to toil ...
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