Something Thoughtful

 

          Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.                           

                                                 THE CHARISMA OF A ROCK

It’s rare to stand in the presence of something that conjures up a deep sense of awe. Recently we found ourselves in the presence of one such thing. We had been holidaying in Northland, weathering the westerly blasts of wind that pushed us along Ripiro [Baylys] Beach, hiking around one of the northerly lakes, and enjoying a serene Kauri Park reserve.

As we began our journey back to Auckland we decided to go off the main road and  follow sat-nav’s instructions in getting to the Maungaraho Rock Scenic Reserve. Winding, twisting roads they were, mainly unsealed and with two or three one-way bridges over streams. Around us were well-managed farms, though houses were few. 

 

 

Maungaraho Rock, a dark mass, loomed larger and larger. We stopped at its foot, got out of the car and gazed. It stood above us, huge, majestic, daunting and at once telling us that we were insignificant ants. Although it was a Saturday morning, there was nobody else around. The information board said the obvious. The great rock mountain, born out of volcanic activity thousands of years ago, was the hardened magma left when softer rock had been slowly ground away by the winds over the millennia.

We walked the neatly-mown grass fringe that runs a short way up the near side of the great rock, after which the only way to go further is to take some rickety-looking steps. Apparently one can walk to the very top, but we are not mountain climbers, the path looked unreliable, so we retreated back to ground level and resumed gazing at the leviathan. How incongruous it was in this landscape. Around us were the Northland farms, neat, orderly and green, stretching away to the horizon. Maungaraho Rock was a rebuke to such a harmless pastoral setting – a reminder that the earth was formed by fire and catastrophe – and it stood as a great darkness in the light.

 

 

It was consoling to watch the cows grazing in the farm next to the great rock.

We drove away through the unsealed roads and back to the main highway.

Have I exaggerated the power of this rock? I know there are dozens – in fact hundreds – of much higher and bigger mountains in New Zealand, more formidable for climbers, that would make Maungaraho seem a pigmy. But the rock dominated low lands and made a mute statement about its singularity. It ruled the region, telling anyone who saw it that it was the chief, the prophet, the ruler. Did anyone ever make it a place for worship? I don’t know – but I’d be surprised if nobody ever did.

 

 

As we drove away I thought about Monument Valley in Arizona U.S.A., the valley that the director John Ford liked to use so often as a backdrop for his best westerns. It’s a desert place with a number of flat-topped megaliths made by eons of rivers biting into sandstone and other soft minerals. That’s not the way Maungaraho was formed, but Maungaraho shares the honour of ruling a territory and reminding us that we are small animals in the face of something genuinely awesome.