Teengālangi, or heaven-pushing place; but the heads of the people
continued to knock on the skies, and the place was excessively hot.
One day a woman was passing along who had been drawing water. A man
came up to her and said he would push up the heavens if she would give
him some water to drink. "Push them up first," she replied. He pushed
them up, and said, "Will that do?" "No," said she, "a little farther."
He sent them up higher still, and then she handed him her cocoa-nut
shell water-bottle. Another account says that the giant god Ti'iti'i
pushed up the heavens, and that at the place where he stood there are
hollow places in a rock nearly six feet long which are pointed out as
his footprints.

2. Tradition says that in former times the people on earth had
frequent _intercourse with the heavens_. We have already noticed some
of these visits (pp. 13, 105). These stories are probably founded on
the old idea that the heavens ended at the horizon. They thought that
there was solidity there as well as extension; and therefore a distant
voyage to some other island might be called a visit to some part of
the heavens. When white men made their appearance, it was thought that
they and the vessel which brought them had in some way broken through
the heavens; and, to this day white men are called Papalangi, or
Heaven-bursters.

But imagination required something more circumstantial, and hence the
variety of traditionary schemes by which the people were supposed to
go up and down on these visits to the heavens. One story speaks of a
mountain, the top of which reached to the skies. Another says that a
very dense column of smoke took people up. Another tells of a tree
which, when it fell, was sixty miles in length. Another tree is
mentioned which formed a sort of ladder, but on different sections of