The theft of the fire

The notebook sets down a recitation. Māui, wanting to know where fire came from, went in the night and put out every cooking-fire in the village. In the morning there was no fire, and he offered to go and fetch it, and was sent to the place where his ancestress Mahuika kept it.

“He came to the burning mountain and asked her for fire. She pulled off one of her fingernails, in which fire burned, and gave it to him. As he went he put it out in the water, and returned, and said the fire had gone out, and asked again; and she gave another nail, and he put that out; and so with the fingers of her hands and the toes of her feet, until only one was left. Then she knew she was mocked, and threw the last nail down, and the fire ran out over the ground, and chased him. He turned himself into a bird of prey, and it burned his wings; he dove into water, and it boiled. He called down the rains, and the fire fled from them into the trees — into the kaikōmako and its kind — where it hides still, and is drawn out by rubbing when it is wanted.”

The whole disaster is caused by a controlled test run at destruction: put out the world’s fire to see where fire is really kept, then extract it a piece at a time. The extraction succeeds and immediately overruns — the fire, once taken, cannot be put back, and nearly takes the taker with it. It is only survived, not undone. And it ends by being lodged: driven into the wood, from which it can be produced again by anyone who knows the friction.

This is the fire told as the roof fragment tells the sentence (AP-0001): a thing that, once loose, cannot be destroyed, only stored in a medium from which it always comes back. The sentence survives undamaged in every carrier; the fire survives in every dry stick. Both are recovered by a small repeated action — a reading, a rubbing — that anyone can perform and no one can revoke. Transcription confidence: 90%.