THE WAIRAU GORGE In one way the south-western is the most enjoyable division of picturesque New Zealand. There is little here to regret or fear for. Unlike the beauty of the northern forests, here is a grandeur that will not pass away. Even in the thermal zone you are haunted by the memory of the lost terraces; but among the alps and fiords of the south-west Nature sits very strongly entrenched. From the Buller Gorge to Puysegur Point, and from Lake Menzies to Lake Hau-roto, both the climate and the lie of the land combine to keep man’s destructiveness at bay. Longitudinal ridges seam this territory from north to south—not a single dividing chain, but half-a-dozen ranges, lofty, steep, and entangled. Rivers thread every valley, and are the swiftest, coldest, and most dangerous of that treacherous race, the mountain torrents of our islands. On the eastern and drier side, settlement can do little to spoil the impressiveness of the mountains; for the great landscapes—at any rate north of Lake Hawea—usually begin at or near the snow-line. The edge [161]of this is several thousand feet lower than in Switzerland. Below it comes a zone sometimes dotted with beech-woods, monotonous and seldom very high, but beautiful in their vesture of grey-green lichen, and carpeted with green and golden moss, often deep and not always soaked and slimy underneath. Or in the open the sub-alpine zone is redeemed by an abundance of ground-flowers such as our lower country cannot show. For this is the home of the deep, bowl-shaped buttercup called the shepherd’s lily, of mountain-daisies and veronicas many and varied, and of those groves of the ribbon-wood that are more lovely than orchards of almond-trees in spring-time. On the rocks above them the mountaineer who has climbed in Switzerland will recognise the edelweiss. Among the blanched snow-grass and coarse tussocks, the thorny “Wild Irishman,” and the spiky “Spaniard,” with its handsome chevaux-de-frise of yellow-green bayonets, conspire to make riding difficult on the flats and terraces. These last often attract the eye by their high faces, bold curves, and curious, almost smooth, regularity. For the rest, the more eastern of the mountains usually become barer and duller as the watershed is left farther behind. Oases of charm they have, where the flora of some sheltered ravine or well-hidden lake detains the botanist; but, as a rule, their brilliant sunshine and exhilarating air, their massive forms and wild intersecting rivers, have much to do to save them from being summed up as stony, arid, bleak, and tiresome.
[162]
 
IN THE HOOKER VALLEY
At its worst, however, the eastern region may claim to be serviceable to the lover of scenery as well as to the sheep-farmer. Its thinly-grassed slopes, bare rocks, and fan-shaped shingle-slips furnish, at any rate, a foil to the grandeur of the central range and the luxuriance of the west. It is, indeed, not easy to believe that such glaciers and passes, such lakes and sea-gulfs, lie beyond the stern barrier, and the enjoyment, when wonderland is penetrated, is all the greater. For the rest, any English reader who cares to feel himself among our tussock-clad ranges will find a masterly sketch of them and their atmosphere in the first chapters of Samuel Butler’s Erewhon. Butler’s sheep-station, “Mesopotamia” by name, lay among the alps of Canterbury, and the satirist himself did some exploring work in his pastoral days, work concerning which I recall a story told me by an old settler whom I will call the Sheriff. This gentleman, meeting Butler one day in Christchurch in the early sixties, noticed that his face and neck were burned to the colour of red-chocolate. “Hullo, my friend,” said he, “you have been among the snow!” “Hush!” answered Butler in an apprehensive whisper, and looking round the smoking-room nervously, “how do you know that?” “By the colour of your face; nothing more,” was the reply. They talked a while, and Butler presently admitted that he had been up to the dividing range and had seen a great sight away beyond it. “I’ve found a hundred thousand acres of ‘country,’” said he. [163]“Naturally I wish you to keep this quiet till I have proved it and applied to the Government for a pastoral licence.” “Well, I congratulate you,” said the Sheriff. “If it will carry sheep you’ve made your fortune, that’s all”; but he intimated his doubts as to whether the blue expanse seen from far off could be grass country. And indeed, when next he met Butler, the latter shook his head ruefully: “You were quite right; it was all bush.” I have often wondered whether that experience was the basis of the passage that tells of the thrilling discovery of Erewhon beyond the pass guarded by the great images.
In one of his letters about the infant Canterbury settlement Butler gives a description of Aorangi, or Mount Cook, which, so far as I know, is the earliest sketch of the mountain by a writer of note. It was, however, not an Englishman, but a German man of science, Sir Julius von Haast, who published the first careful and connected account of the Southern Alps. Von Haast was not a mountaineer, but a geologist, and though he attacked Aorangi, he did not ascend more than two-thirds of it. But he could write, and had an eye for scenery as well as for strata. The book which he published on the geology of Canterbury and Westland did very much the same service to the Southern Alps that von Hochstetter’s contemporary work did for the hot lakes. The two German savants brought to the knowledge of the world outside two very different but remarkable regions. It is true that the realm of flowery uplands, glaciers, ice-walls, and snow-fields told of by von Haast, had nothing in it so uncommon as the [164]geysers and so strange as the pink and white terraces made familiar by von Hochstetter. But the higher Southern Alps, when once you are among them, may fairly challenge comparison with those of Switzerland. Their elevation is not equal by two or three thousand feet, but the lower level of their snow-line just about makes up the disparity. Then, too, on the flanks of their western side the mountains of the south have a drapery of forest far more varied and beautiful than the Swiss pine woods. On the western side, too, the foot of the mountain rampart is virtually washed by the ocean. Take the whole mountain territory of the south-west with its passes, lakes, glaciers, river-gorges, and fiords, and one need not hesitate to assert that it holds its own when compared with what Nature has done in Switzerland, Savoy, and Dauphiny.
 
MOUNT COOK
Aorangi, with its 12,349 feet, exceeds the peak of Teneriffe by 159 feet. It is the highest point in our islands, for Mount Tasman, its neighbour, which comes second, fails to equal it by 874 feet. Only two or three other summits surpass 11,000 feet, and the number which attain to anything over 10,000 is not great. From the south-west, Aorangi, with the ridge attached to it, resembles the high-pitched roof of a Gothic church with a broad, massive spire standing up from the northern end. When, under strong sunlight, the ice glitters on the steep crags, and the snow-fields, unearthly in their purity, contrast with the green tint of the crawling glaciers, the great mountain is a spectacle worthy of its fame. Yet high and shapely [165]as it is, and worthy of its name, Cloud-in-the-Heavens, it is not the most beautiful mountain in the islands. That honour may be claimed by Egmont, just as Tongariro may demand precedence as the venerated centre of Maori reverence and legend. Nor, formidable as Aorangi looks, is it, I should imagine, as impracticable as one or two summits farther south, notably Mount Balloon. However, unlike Kosciusko in Australia, it is a truly imposing height, and worthy of its premier place. With it the story of New Zealand alpine-climbing has been bound up for a quarter of a century, and such romance as that story has to show is chiefly found in attempts, successful and unsuccessful, to reach the topmost point of Aorangi. Canterbury had been settled for thirty-two years before the first of these was made. For the low snow-line, great cliffs, and enormous glaciers of the Southern Alps have their especial cause of origin. They bespeak an extraordinary steepness in the rock faces, and a boisterous climate with rapid and baffling changes of temperature. Not a climber or explorer amongst them but has been beaten back at times by tempests, or held a prisoner for many hours, listening through a sleepless night to the howling of north-west or south-west wind—lucky if he is not drenched to the skin by rain or flood. As for the temperature, an observer once noted a fall of fifty-three degrees in a few hours. On the snow-fields the hot sun blisters the skin of your face and neck, and even at a lower level makes a heavy coat an intolerable burden; but the same coat—flung impatiently on the ground and [166]left there—may be picked up next morning frozen as stiff as a board. These extremes of heat and cold, these sudden and furious gales, are partly, I imagine, the cause of the loose and rotten state of much of the rock-surface, of the incessant falls of stones, ice-blocks, and snow, and of the number and size of the avalanches. At any rate, the higher alps showed a front which, to ordinary dwellers on our plains, seemed terrific, and which even gave pause to mountain-climbers of some Swiss experience. So even von Haast’s book did not do much more than increase the number of visitors to the more accessible glaciers and sub-alpine valleys. The spirit of mountaineering lay dormant year after year, and it was not until 1882 that an unexpected invader from Europe delivered the sudden and successful stroke that awoke it. The raider was Mr. Green, an Irish clergyman, who, with two Swiss guides, Boss and Kaufmann, landed in the autumn of 1882. His object was the ascent of Aorangi; he had crossed the world to make it. He found our inner mountains just as Nature had left them, and, before beginning his climb, had to leave human life behind, and camp at the foot of the mountain with so much of the resources of civilisation as he could take with him. One of his first encounters with a New Zealand river in a hurry ended in the loss of his light cart, which was washed away. Its wrecked and stranded remains lay for years in the river-bed a battered relic of a notable expedition. To cap his troubles, a pack-horse carrying flour, tea, sugar, and spare clothing, coolly lay down when fording[167] a shallow torrent, and rolled on its back—and therefore on its pack—in the rapid water. Ten days of preliminary tramping and clambering, during which five separate camps were formed, only carried the party with their provisions and apparatus to a height of less than 4000 feet above the sea. They had toiled over moraine boulders, been entangled in dense and prickly scrubs, and once driven back by a fierce north-wester. On the other hand the scenery was glorious and the air exhilarating. Nothing round them seemed tame except the wild birds. Keas, wekas, and blue ducks were as confiding and fearless as our birds are wont to be till man has taught them distrust and terror. Among these the Swiss obtained the raw material of a supper almost as easily as in a farmyard. On the 25th of February the final ascent was begun. But Aorangi did not yield at the first summons. Days were consumed in futile attempts from the south and east. On their first day they were checked by finding themselves on a crumbling knife-like ridge, from which protruded spines of rock that shook beneath their tread. A kick, so it seemed, would have sent the surface into the abyss on either side. The bridge that leads to the Mahometan paradise could not be a more fearful passage. Two days later they were baffled on the east side by walls of rock from which even Boss and Kaufmann turned hopelessly away. It was not until March 2, after spending a night above the clouds, that they hit upon a new glacier, the Linda, over which they found a winding route to the north-eastern [168]ridge which joins Cook to Tasman. The day’s work was long and severe, and until late in the afternoon the issue was doubtful. A gale burst upon them from the north-west, and they had to go on through curling mists and a wind that chilled them to the bone. It was six o’clock in the evening when they found themselves standing on the icy scalp of the obstinate mountain, and even then they did not attain the highest point. There was not a moment to lose if they were to regain some lower point of comparative security; for March is the first month of autumn in South New Zealand, and the evenings then begin to draw in. So Mr. Green had to retreat when within either a few score feet or a few score yards of the actual goal. As it was, night closed in on the party when they were but a short way down, and they spent the dark hours on a ledge less than two feet wide, high over an icy ravine. Sleep or faintness alike meant death. They stood there hour after hour singing, stamping, talking, and listening to the rain pattering on rock and hissing on snow. All night long the wind howled: the wall at their backs vibrated to the roar of the avalanches: water streaming down its face soaked their clothing. For food they had three meat lozenges each. They sucked at empty pipes, and pinched and nudged each other to drive sleep away. By the irony of fate it happened that close beneath them were wide and almost comfortable shelves. But night is not the time to wander about the face of a precipice, looking for sleeping berths, 10,000 feet above the sea. Mr. Green and his [169]guides were happy to escape with life and limb, and not to have to pay such a price for victory as was paid by Whymper’s party after scaling the Matterhorn.
Mr. Green’s climb, the tale of which is told easily in his own bright and workmanlike book, gave an enlivening shock to young New Zealand. It had been left to a European to show them the way; but the lesson was not wasted. They now understood that mountains were something more than rough country, some of which carried sheep, while some did not. They learned that they had an alpine playground equal to any in the Old World—a new realm where danger might be courted and exploits put on record. The dormant spirit of mountaineering woke up at last. Many difficulties confronted the colonial lads. They had everything to learn and no one to teach them. Without guides, equipment, or experience—without detailed maps, or any preliminary smoothing of the path, they had to face unforeseen obstacles and uncommon risks. They had to do everything for themselves. Only by endangering their necks could they learn the use of rope and ice-axe. Only by going under fire, and being grazed or missed by stones and showers of ice, could they learn which hours of the day and conditions of the weather were most dangerous, and when slopes might be sought and when ravines must be shunned. They had to teach themselves the trick of the glissade and the method of crossing frail bridges of snow. Appliances they could import from Europe. As for guides, some of them turned guides themselves. Of course they started [170]with a general knowledge of the climate, of “roughing it” in the hills, and of life in the open. They could scramble to the heights to which sheep scramble, and could turn round in the wilderness without losing their way. Thews and sinews, pluck and enthusiasm, had to do the rest, and gradually did it. As Mr. Malcolm Ross, one of the adventurous band, has pointed out with legitimate pride, their experience was gained and their work done without a single fatal accident—a happy record, all the more striking by contrast with the heavy toll of life levied by the rivers of our mountain territory. The company of climbers, therefore, must have joined intelligence to resolution, for, up to the present, they have broken nothing but records. Mr. Mannering, one of the earliest of them, attacked Aorangi five times within five years. After being thwarted by such accidents as rain-storms, the illness of a companion, and—most irritating of all—the dropping of a “swag” holding necessaries, he, with his friend Mr. Dixon, at last attained to the ice-cap in December 1890. Their final climb was a signal exhibition of courage and endurance. They left their bivouac (7480 feet in air) at four o’clock in the morning, and, after nine hours of plodding upward in soft snow had to begin the labour of cutting ice-steps. In the morning they were roasted by the glaring sun; in the shade of the afternoon their rope and coats were frozen stiff, and the skin from their hands stuck to the steel of their ice-axes. Dixon, a thirteen-stone man, fell through a snow-wreath, and was only saved by a supreme effort. Pelted by falling ice [171]the two amateurs cut their way onward, and at half-past five in the evening found themselves unscathed and only about a hundred feet below the point gained by Mr. Green and his Swiss. They made an effort to hew steps up to the apex of the ice-cap, but time was too short and the wind was freshening; as it was they had to work their way down by lantern light. Now they had to creep backwards, now to clean out the steps cut in the daylight; now their way was lost, again they found it, and discovered that some gulf had grown wider. They did not regain their bivouac till nearly three in the morning after twenty-three hours of strain to body and mind.[4]
[4] For Mr. Mannering’s narrative see With Axe and Rope in the New Zealand Alps, London, 1891.
 
MOUNT SEFTON
Four years later came victory, final and complete, and won in a fashion peculiarly gratifying to young New Zealand. News came that Mr. E. A. Fitzgerald, a skilled mountaineer, was coming from Europe to achieve the technical success which Green and Mannering had just missed. Some climbers of South Canterbury resolved to anticipate him, and, for the honour of the colony, be the first to stand on the coveted pinnacle. A party of three—Messrs. Clark, Graham, and Fyfe—left Timaru, accordingly, and on Christmas Day 1894 achieved their object. Mr. Fitzgerald arrived only to find that he had been forestalled, and must find other peaks to conquer. Of these there was no lack; he had some interesting experiences. After his return to England he remarked to the writer that climbing in [172]the Andes was plain and easy in comparison with the dangers and difficulties of the Southern Alps. One of his severest struggles, however, was not with snow and ice, but with a river and forest in Westland. Years before, Messrs. Harper and Blakiston had surmounted the saddle—or, more properly speaking, wall—at the head of the Hooker glacier, and looking over into Westland, had ascertained that it would be possible to go down to the coast by that way. Government surveyors had confirmed this impression, but no one had traversed the pass. It remained for Mr. Fitzgerald to do this and show that the route was practicable. He and his guide Zurbriggen accomplished the task. They must, however, have greatly underestimated the difficulties which beset those who would force a passage along the bed of an untracked western torrent. Pent in a precipitous gorge, they had to wade and stumble along a wild river-trough. Here they clung to or clambered over dripping rocks, there they were numbed in the ice-cold and swirling water. Enormous boulders encumbered and almost barred the ravine, so that the river itself had had to scoop out subterranean passages through which the explorers were fain to creep. Taking to the shore, as they won their way downward, they tried to penetrate the matted scrubs. Even had they been bushmen, and armed with tomahawks and slashers, they would have found this no easy task. As it was they returned to the river-bed and trudged along, wet and weary; their provisions gave out, and Fitzgerald had to deaden the pangs of hunger by chewing black [173]tobacco. He found the remedy effectual, but very nauseating. Without gun or powder and shot, and knowing nothing of the botany of the country, they ran very close to starvation, and must have lost their lives had a sudden flood filled the rivers’ tributaries and so cut them off from the coast. As it was they did the final forty-eight hours of walking without food, and were on their last legs when they heard the dogs barking in a surveyor’s camp, where their adventure ended.
Not caring to follow in the wake of others, Mr. Fitzgerald left Aorangi alone, but Zurbriggen climbed thither on his own account in 1895. An Anglo-Colonial party gained the top ten years later, so that the ice-cap may now almost be classed among familiar spots. Still, as late as 1906 something still remained to be done on the mountain—namely, to go up on one side and go down on the other. This feat, so simple to state, but so difficult to perform, was accomplished last year by three New Zealanders and an Englishman. To make sure of having time enough, they started from their camp—which was at a height of between 6000 and 7000 feet on the eastern side—three-quarters of an hour before midnight. Hours of night walking followed over moonlit snows, looked down upon by ghostly crests. When light came the day was fine and grew bright and beautiful,—so clear that looking down they could see the ocean beyond the eastern shore, the homesteads standing out on the yellow-green plains, and on the snows, far, very far down, their own footprints dotting the smooth whiteness beneath them. It [174]took them, however, nearly fourteen hours to reach the summit, and then the most dangerous part of their work only began. They had to gain the Hooker glacier by creeping down frosted rocks as slippery as an ice-slide. Long bouts of step-cutting had to be done, and in places the men had to be lowered by the rope one at a time. Instead of reaching their goal—the Hermitage Inn below the glacier—in twenty hours, they consumed no less than thirty-six. During these they were almost incessantly in motion, and as a display of stamina the performance, one imagines, must rank high among the exertions of mountaineers. Many fine spectacles repaid them. One of these, a western view from the rocks high above the Hooker glacier, is thus described by Mr. Malcolm Ross, who was of the party:—
“The sun dipped to the rim of the sea, and the western heavens were glorious with colour, heightened by the distant gloom. Almost on a level with us, away beyond Sefton, a bank of flame-coloured cloud stretched seaward from the lesser mountains towards the ocean, and beyond that again was a far-away continent of cloud, sombre and mysterious as if it were part of another world. The rugged mountains and the forests and valleys of southern Westland were being gripped in the shades of night. A long headland, still thousands of feet below on the south-west, stretched itself out into the darkened sea, a thin line of white at its base indicating the tumbling breakers of the Pacific Ocean.”
[175]
 
THE TASMAN GLACIER
Mr. Green, as he looked out from a half-way halting-place on the ascent of Aorangi, and took in the succession of crowded, shining crests and peaks surging up to the north and north-east of him, felt the Alpine-climber’s spirit glow within him. Here was a wealth of peaks awaiting conquest; here was adventure enough for the hands and feet of a whole generation of mountaineers. Scarcely one of the heights had then been scaled. This is not so now. Peak after peak of the Southern Alps has fallen to European or Colonial enterprise, and the ambitious visitor to the Mount Cook region, in particular, will have some trouble to find much that remains virgin and yet accessible. For the unambitious, on the other hand, everything has been made easy. The Government and its tourist department has taken the district in hand almost as thoroughly as at Roto-rua, and the holiday-maker may count on being housed, fed, driven about, guided, and protected efficiently and at a reasonable price. Happily, too, nothing staring or vulgar defaces the landscape. Nor do tourists, yet, throng the valleys in those insufferable crowds that spoil so much romance in Switzerland and Italy. Were they more numerous than they are, the scale of the ranges and glaciers is too large to allow the vantage-spots to be mobbed. Take the glaciers: take those that wind along the flanks of the Mount Cook range on its eastern and western sides, and, converging to the south, are drained by the river Tasman. The Tasman glacier itself is eighteen miles long; its greatest width is over two miles; its average [176]width over a mile. The Murchison glacier, which joins the Tasman below the glacier ice, is more than ten miles long. And to the west and south-west of the range aforesaid, the Hooker and Mueller glaciers are on a scale not much less striking. The number of tributary glaciers that feed these enormous ice-serpents has not, I fancy, been closely estimated, but from heights lofty enough to overlook most of the glacier system that veins the Aorangi region, explorers have counted over fifty seen from one spot. Perhaps the finest sight in the alpine country—at any rate to those who do not scale peaks—is the Hochstetter ice-fall. This frozen cataract comes down from a great snow plateau, some 9000 feet above the sea, to the east of Aorangi. The fall descends, perhaps, 4000 feet to the Tasman glacier. It is much more than a mile in breadth, and has the appearance of tumbling water, storm-beaten, broken, confused, surging round rocks. It has, indeed, something more than the mere appearance of wild unrest, for water pours through its clefts, and cubes and toppling pinnacles of ice break away and crash as they fall from hour to hour.
 
THE CECIL AND WALTER PEAKS
If the Hochstetter has a rival of its own kind in the island, that would seem to be the Douglas glacier. This, scarcely known before 1907, was then visited and examined by Dr. Mackintosh Bell. By his account it surpasses the Hochstetter in this, that instead of confronting the stern grandeur of an Alpine valley, it looks down upon the evergreen forest and unbroken foliage of Westland. The glacier itself comes down [177]from large, high-lying snow-fields over a mighty cliff, estimated to be 3000 feet in height. The upper half of the wall is clothed with rugged ice; but the lower rock-face is too steep for this, and its perpendicular front is bare. Beneath it the glacier continues. Waterfall succeeds waterfall: thirty-five in all stream down from the ice above to the ice below. Mingled with the sound of their downpouring the explorers heard the crashing of the avalanches. Every few minutes one of these slid or shot into the depths. Roar followed roar like cannon fired in slow succession, so that the noise echoing among the mountains drowned the voices of the wondering beholders.
Oddly enough the lakes of the South Island are nearly all on the drier side of the watershed. Kanieri and Mahinapua, two well-known exceptions, are charming, but small. A third exception, Brunner, is large, but lies among wooded hills without any special pretensions to grandeur. For the rest the lakes are to the east of the dividing range, and may be regarded as the complement of the fiords to the west thereof. But their line stretches out much farther to the north, for they may be said to include Lake Roto-roa, a long, narrow, but beautiful water, folded among the mountains of Nelson. Then come Brunner and Sumner, and the series continues in fine succession southwards, ending with Lake Hau-roto near the butt-end of the island. Broadly speaking, the lake scenery improves as you go south. Wakatipu is in advance of Wanaka and Hawea, Te Anau of Wakatipu; while Manapouri, beautiful in [178]irregularity, fairly surpasses all its fellows. The northern half of Wakatipu is, indeed, hard to beat; but the southern arm, though grand, curves among steeps too hard and treeless to please the eye altogether. In the same way Te Anau would be the finest lake in the islands were it not for the flatness of most of the eastern shore; the three long western arms are magnificent, and so is the northern part of the main water. But of Manapouri one may write without ifs and buts. Its deep, clear waters moving round a multitude of islets; its coves and cliff-points, gulf beyond gulf and cape beyond cape; the steeps that overhang it, so terrific, yet so richly clothed; the unscathed foliage sprinkled with tree-flowers,—all form as faultless a combination of lovely scenes as a wilderness can well show. From the western arm that reaches out as though to penetrate to the sea-fiords not far away beyond the mountains, to the eastern bay, whence the deep volume of the Waiau flows out, there is nothing to spoil the charm. What Lucerne is to Switzerland Manapouri is to New Zealand. Man has not helped it with historical associations and touches of foreign colour. On the other hand, man has not yet spoiled it with big hotels, blatant advertisements, and insufferable press of tourists.
 
MANAPOURI
In one respect—their names—our South Island lakes are more lucky than our mountains. Most of them have been allowed to keep the names given them by the Maori. When the Polynesian syllables are given fair play—which is not always the case in the white man’s [179]mouth—they are usually liquid or dignified. Manapouri, Te Anau, Roto-roa, and Hau-roto, are fair examples. Fortunately the lakes which we have chosen to rechristen have seldom been badly treated. Coleridge, Christabel, Alabaster, Tennyson, Ellesmere, Marian, Hilda, are pleasant in sound and suggestion. Our mountains have not come off so well—in the South Island at any rate. Some have fared better than others. Mount Aspiring, Mount Pisa, the Sheerdown, the Remarkables, Mounts Aurum, Somnus, Cosmos, Fourpeaks, Hamilton, Wakefield, Darwin, Brabazon, Alexander, Rolleston, Franklin, Mitre Peak, Terror Peak, and the Pinnacle, are not names to cavil at. But I cannot think that such appellations as Cook, Hutt, Brown, Stokes, Jukes, Largs, Hopkins, Dick, Thomas, Harris, Pillans, Hankinson, Thompson, and Skelmorlies, do much to heighten scenic grandeur. However, there they are, and there, doubtless, they will remain; for we are used to them, so do not mind them. We should even, it may be, be sorry to lose them.
 
MITRE PEAK
The Sounds—the watery labyrinth of the south-west coast—have but one counterpart in the northern hemisphere, the fiords of Norway. Whether their number should be reckoned to be fifteen or nineteen is of no consequence. Enough that between Big Bay and Puysegur Point they indent the littoral with successive inlets winding between cliffs, straying round islets and bluffs, and penetrating deep into the heart of the Alps. They should be called fiords, for that name alone gives [180]any suggestion of their slender length and of the towering height of the mountains that confine them. But the pioneers and sailors of three generations ago chose to dub them “The Sounds,” so The Sounds they remain. It is best to approach them from the south, beginning with Perseverance Inlet and ending with Milford Sound. For the heights round Milford are the loftiest of any, and after their sublimity the softer aspect of some of the other gulfs is apt to lose impressiveness. The vast monotony and chilly uneasiness of the ocean without heightens the contrast at the entrances. Outside the guardian headlands all is cold and uneasy. Between one inlet and another the sea beats on sheer faces of cruel granite. Instantaneous is the change when the gates are entered, and the voyager finds his vessel floating on a surface narrower than a lake and more peaceful than a river. The very throbbing of a steamer’s engines becomes gentler and reaches the ears softly like heart-beats. The arms of the mountains seem stretched to shut out tumult and distraction. Milford, for instance, is a dark-green riband of salt water compressed between cliffs less than a mile apart, and in one pass narrowing to a width of five hundred yards. Yet though the bulwarks of your ship are near firm earth, the keel is far above it. All the Sounds are deep: when Captain Cook moored the Endeavour in Dusky Sound her yards interlocked with the branches of trees. But Milford is probably the deepest of all. There the sounding-line has reached bottom at nearly thirteen hundred feet. Few swirling currents seem to [181]disturb these quiet gulfs; and the sweep of the western gales, too, is shut out from most of the bays and reaches. The force that seems at work everywhere and always is water. Clouds and mists in a thousand changing shapes fleet above the mountain crests, are wreathed round peaks, or drift along the fronts of the towering cliffs. When they settle down the rain falls in sheets: an inch or thereabouts may be registered daily for weeks. But it does not always rain in the Sounds, and when it ceases and the sunshine streams down, the innumerable waterfalls are a spectacle indeed. At any time the number of cascades and cataracts is great: the roar of the larger and the murmur of the smaller are the chief sounds heard; they take the place of the wind that has been left outside the great enclosures. But after heavy rain—and most rains on that coast are heavy—the number of waterfalls defies computation. They seam the mountain-sides with white lines swiftly moving, embroider green precipices with silver, and churn up the calm sea-water with their plunging shock. The highest of them all, the Sutherland, is not on the sea-shore, but lies fourteen miles up a densely-wooded valley. It is so high—1904 feet—that the three cascades of its descent seem............