A great area has been reclaimed. Old stone warehouses have been pulled down to make way for the railway and locomotive sheds, and a blackened, smoky archway, low down near the great graving dock, shows me the sea-end of the famous tunnel through the towering mountain, which Moorhouse projected, and which had not long been begun when I arrived in the colony.
Then, Lyttelton was but a little village of weather-board huts. Now it is a crowded town of gable-ends peeping up in serried rows all over the hills. Alas! the cemetery on the hill is more densely peopled now, too, than it was then.
The tunnel is 2870 yards long, and brings all the Canterbury plains into direct touch with the sea. The magnificent back-country of New South Wales is as yet in a worse plight than the plains of this little province. The railway system of Sydney practically stops short of the sea by a weary gap of two or three miles; so far at any rate as passengers are concerned. What a bitter satire on the vaunted wealth and energy and enterprise of Sydney blood!
The Graving Dock is another achievement of which the Canterbury people may well be proud. It is over 400 feet in length. In fact we saw the fine steamer Kaikora berthed high and dry in the dock, getting a new blade put on to her screw. The Kaikora is 420 feet on the keel, and the dock could have taken a much larger vessel than that.
