Through South Westland/Part 1/Chapter 4

by A. Maud Moreland

CHAPTER IV.

THE WAIHO GORGE AND A HATTER.

The spear-grass crackles under the billy, and overhead is the winter’s sun;

There’s snow on the hills, there’s frost in the gully, that minds me of things that I’ve seen and done,

Of blokes that I knew, and mates that I’ve worked with, and the sprees we had in the days gone by;

And a mist comes up from my heart to my eyelids; I feel fair sick, and I wonder why.

David McKeb Wright.

The harbour-master and I continued our way to a straggling little settlement at the foot of precipitous bush-clad hills, the outliers of the high ranges behind. Deep gorges with foaming torrents cleft them in all directions, and we drove across a flat where the road winds amid scrub and stones and yellow grasses, with the Waiho river eddying among its boulders on the right hand. As one proceeds, one of the finest, and perhaps one of the strangest, views in the world unfolds; for where else can we hope to find a combination of colour like this? The dark mountains rising purple to the snow, peak beyond peak of the Southern Alps soaring white against that wondrous blue—so close they seem, so attainable—it is hard to realize they are 10,000 feet above us. And between two mountain walls, filling a mighty gorge, winds down the Franz Josef glacier; an icy chaos of pinnacles and seracs, green-blue and glittering white against the purple-black crags of the gorge. But strangest of all is where the glacier and the forest meet, and the splendid scarlet of the ratas seems almost to touch the ice and snow. The forest itself, ringed with vivid green of tree-fern and a hundred subtropical plants, adds the last touch of vivid contrast. Rhododendrons against Himalayan snow may come to mind, but Himalayan landscapes are too vast . . . . . . This is South Westland, and nowhere else. We, who have seen it, want to compare it with nothing else. The glacier comes down to the very fringe of the tree-ferns and the ratas, to within 600 feet of sea level and ten miles of the sea—as the crow flies; and this in a climate moist and warm for the greater part of the year—a climate that favours the most varied production of rare and lovely ferns, astelias, and many a shrub and plant cultivated with utmost care at home. Was it any wonder that I gazed spellbound—trying to take it in, as the eye travelled over that marvellous picture?

There was a fine new hotel being built out on the flat, but we drove to the little old accommodation-house at the edge of the bush—a punga house, i.e., built of fern-logs on end, filled in with moss and grass. A house of this kind may even grow—for the ferns are very tenacious of life, and I have seen a fence where the posts were nearly all sending out spreading heads of beautiful fern.

There was a central guest-room; and other little rooms had been added as they were needed.

Each had its own outer door, and as the windows were not made to open, I had to keep my door open all night, and as I lay in bed could hear the rumbling of the glacier and the roaring of the Waiho, and see the stars as they marched across the sky. There was also a store and a post-office, and a weekly coach-service, for the Waiho boasts a gold mine—of which more later. Near the store there is a room where a service is held once in two months, for the diggers and dwellers in the gorge, and we heard there had been a congregation of nineteen that Sunday. The parson was making one of his periodical visitations, and came to meet us as we went up to the punga house. The store was a fascinating place, and I felt sure we should lay in some indispensable things for our further trip, but I could only get stamps—the cord-soled shoes, picks, billies, buckets, axe-heads, and other useful things we left. Transome tried to buy a hat. He had started in a new Panama, which, from repeated wettings and sittings-on, was shrunk and threatening to fall into holes; but it seemed a hat was the one thing the store could not provide.

That first afternoon we devoted to the inspection of the hot springs. It was indescribably weird to have a pool of boiling water close to a glacier! We went up along a torrent-bed, and in a clearing on the edge of the bush was a corrugated-iron hut,^[1] a simple sort of bath-house with a wooden trough sunk in the floor. A bench ran round the walls, and a small hand-pump brought up the evil-smelling water, at such a temperature one had to wait for it to cool before bathing. If the extreme potency of the smell were any gauge for the potency of the water-cure, there ought to be a hydro here—never have I smelt anything so horrid. Transome preferred to bathe in the hot pool outside, taking a cold douche in the torrent after, and certainly all traces of fatigue vanished like magic, and we agreed it was a wonderful spring. There was a rugged path climbing up the steep hill behind, and here we came on the Eremite, who dwelt like the dryad of this strange place.

When we saw him first he was advancing to meet us—bare-headed, in a tattered old brown jersey, and much-worn pants held together by a strap, but greeting us right cheerily, and bidding us welcome to his house. The house itself stood in the heart of the forest tangle. The sort of place one only finds on the borders of civilization—there was more chimney than house: a veritable stack of planks and logs, and why it did not burn down I can’t imagine. Inside was a huge hearth, and the one room was but the annexe to the chimney. Outside the house, a little plateau had been built up with infinite pains, and here was an attempt at a garden. Just a few potatoes and straggling strawberry plants. The hillside below this fell away steeply to a ravine, and, standing there one gazed out over a glorious vista of rolling hills and forest, to the far-away coast line and the hazy sea. Having welcomed us, the Eremite dived into the dark recess of his dwelling, emerging again with a bottle and a tumbler. “Come in, come in,” he invited us, “and taste my home brew”; and as we declined to enter: “Well, you’ll take a glass anyway”—and forthwith he poured out some of his herb-beer. I hope we did not hurt his feelings by any seeming reluctance, but truth to tell it was a fearsome decoction, and a sip was enough. He then set off to hunt for strawberries, and presented me with two—there was quite a promising colony established on his roof. “Now,” he said, “you’ll come down into my gold mine,” and with incredible agility he set off down the ravine, scrambling over rocks, and hopping from stone to stone like an uncouth old bird. He had paved a little runnel which he calls his “race,” and at the bottom was the scene of his labours. A crowbar, a pick, and a shovel lay near; here he delves in the grit and débris of the old working, apparently quite happy. His face fell for a moment when I asked if he ever got any gold out of it. “Not for a long time now; no, not for a long time—it may be two years and more since gold came out of it.” But he cheered up immediately, and scrambled back to his wharé, and came a little way with us to show us the best road. We learnt he had squatted there for eight years quite alone, and went by the name of “Piggery Charlie.” I was glad to hear poor Charlie was an old-age pensioner, and did not depend on the gold-mine for a living. Next day I took him a present of tobacco, and got an even warmer welcome. Out came the bottle and tumbler, but I pleaded the early hour as an excuse, and was then taken inside, where Charlie began rummaging in an awful litter of things, and presently found what he wanted. I should think the biscuits he now handed me were years old, quite mouldy, and little currants sticking in them. Charlie was bent on being hospitable. Next came out bundles of letters and piles of unopened newpapers from London—for though he has wandered in the wilderness here and in Australia this fifty years, his people have not forgotten him. He was indeed a typical “Hatter.” Said Charlie: “If you’ll marry me and come up here, I’ll make a fine place of it. I’ll cut down the bush, and I’ll get a cow.” I assured him—however alluring this prospect for my future settlement in life might be—it was quite impossible, and I rose to go. But I had only gone a few yards on the path when he came flying after me, with a newspaper wrapper with his name and address. The last I saw of my “Hatter,” he was waving farewells and shouting after me: “You’ll think of it, won’t you?—and I’ll get the cow, and make a grand place of it.” My heart was always sorry for these lonely old men we found. They who, in the days of their youth and strength, often handled their hundreds—now only old hangers-on,

waiting out their few years, clinging to the scenes they know—nowhere else for them in the wide world. The companies get all the gold nowadays; the Hatters are the last of their race.

I crossed the gorge by a bridge suspended high in air, just two planks with wires on both sides—a slip, and there would have been no more wandering! Far beneath, the Waiho churned and boiled in yellow foam, and the bridge swayed alarmingly. On the other side was a bit of road leading past a trim cottage with green doors and windows, and a garden gay with flowers. The forest shut it in, and the grim walls of the Waiho gorge rose behind, and in the pleasant living-room I sat and chatted long; heard tales of the five stalwart sons, and of the grandchildren, of the diggers in the gorge, and the Hatters among the hills. The mountains and the forest and the great glacier are, to the old lady who lives there under shadow of the everlasting hills, “The wonderful works of God: Can we have anything but good when we live so close to the grand works of our Father?” And to her the Church Service every other month is, “The oasis in the desert of our lives, where we can drink of the Water of Life.” We never met again, but we seemed to have known each other always.

There was the gold-mine still to visit, and on a very wet afternoon we set out under the parson’s escort to see it. He led us up the Callery gorge with the rain coming down, as it can come in the West—sheets and buckets of water; and we plunged into dripping bush, where water poured in all directions in streams and rivulets. The trees were literally clothed with ferns; filmy ferns crept along the branches, and kidney-ferns draped the trunks with their exquisite green lobes. Mosses, green and lovely, covered everything, and for a little way we went among the living green: but then came the abomination of desolation. . . . we stood on the raw edge of a scar that tore the hill-side open. Grey rocks and stones were hurled in confusion; along the edge of the gaping wound tottering trees still clung, or pitched headlong down, mixed with tree-ferns and ratas—a world of loveliness lay destroyed at our feet. On all hands was evidence of sluicing operations. Up a steep hill opposite, a line of felled trees showed where the great pipes were laid which brought that tremendous force of water to the hose, and the din in the air from the discharging water was terrific. Down below we watched men in top-boots and oilskins at work. They had just finished sluicing, and were moving the dirt along a wooden channel at the bottom. It was something of a scramble to get down, mud and stones and clay came away at every step, and water ran down in one’s tracks. Arrived at the bottom, the foreman came forward and the men gathered round, all anxious we should see everything. Some had coarse rakes, and one an old shovel, and they showed me the movable blocks, fitting like a large mosaic in a kind of trough, over which the débris is raked after a fresh portion of the hill has been sluiced. The fine mud settles, and about once a fortnight they lift the blocks and wash the silt. That day they had taken out £64 worth of gold. With a scrub-brush and an old fire-shovel—or was it a dustpan?—the foreman lifted some mud and proceeded to “wash” it in a battered old tin-basin. And presently he laid upon my palm several little yellow discs. They were quite thin and round, and varied from the size of a pin-head to a threepenny bit. I gazed at them wonderingly—so unlike what I expected. That’s glacier gold,” said he, “we don’t know where the reef it came from was, but it was somewhere up there in the mountains. It’s been squeezed and flattened right enough in the ice, and carried down till it got buried in these old moraines.” He told me most of these steep foot-hills were old moraine—and another odd thing was, that they often find a bullet when they are washing! How it gets there, when there have been so few people to shoot seems a mystery. Geologists tell us the Southern Alps are but half as high as in the age when the great ice-cap covered these islands, and that our present glaciers are but the shrinking remains of those vanished ones which wore down these hills, and gouged out these valleys. It is a long story since these little yellow discs got scraped up by the ice-plough, and carried along till they were melted out in this old moraine. A very long story till to-day, when the Waiho Company comes with its rakes and shovels, tearing down the ever-lasting hills—all for the sake of these same little yellow discs. It was all so fascinating: I would dearly have loved to stay there and wash silt in the basin! With difficulty I was got away from that muddy trench. My companions were already calling to me from above, and I looked aghast at the means to get out—a scaffolding (rather than ladder) up which they had so nimbly scrambled—I had to pull myself up from bar to bar as best I might, unaided by rope or hand-rail. Once at the top, I waved farewell to the men below; we said good-bye to the parson, and Transome and I set off to get a nearer view of the glacier. It was about three o’clock, and the rain had ceased, but water poured down in all directions across the track, and the trees and ferns dripped moisture. It was really quite a good pathway, winding along about half-way up the right side of the gorge, with the tumultuous Waiho below us. The dense growth continued to quite near the ice; unknown plants and shrubs met the eye everywhere. Strange dracophyllums raised their branched stems twenty or thirty feet high, with purplish aloe-like leaves—no one would believe, to look at them, that these curious trees could belong to the heaths, yet such is the fact. They bear closely-packed panicles of red flowers, sometimes a foot-and-a-half long. D. latifolium is red, while D. longifolium is white, and there are five or six others in the family, so

exceedingly unlike one another that they look like plants of different genera. The Maori name is nei-nei, but the settlers call it the grass-tree. When the forest came to an end, we entered on a dreary extent of moraine—a chaos of ridges and stones which filled the valley. In part it was overgrown by thickets of manuka scrub and tangles of hooked “lawyer,” and tufts of grass and herbs covered the ridges. In a hollow was a Government hut, with bunks and stores; just then, this was occupied by two men, who had been for some time trying to build a bridge across the glacier river. The work was well started, when the river departed to the other side of the gorge, making a new channel for itself; and the men were living there, waiting in hope of it coming back. They offered us tea, and came to show us the best way to the glacier-foot. The glacier lies in a wide valley, shut in by steep, black-looking mountains; and between their walls, for nine miles beyond this, the Franz Josef fills the whole space, five hundred to a thousand feet deep. At last we found ourselves actually standing below the glacier “snout”—an awful barricade of dirty ice, stones, and mud, from whose foot the muddy torrent swirled away to our left. There was no crossing it without a horse. Great blocks of ice had fallen that day, shooting right across it, and some lay in the stream obstructing its passage. We could only gaze up at the glacier-foot—a cold, wet air smote our faces, the clouds hung low to the mountains, only glimpses to be caught of bare snow-slopes and mountain walls. All was dismal—“horrid,” as Evelyn would have said—shrouded in mist. Yet, on the other hand, the valley was still clothed with many kinds of plants, and tree-veronicas and ratas flowered alongside the ice. Our guide had gone back after bringing us thus far, and we never thought of having the slightest difficulty in reaching the hut again. Now, when we turned to go, the whole place seemed to have changed. There was no one to ask our way, and the dusk was falling. Each stony ridge we climbed over we imagined to be the last, and that we should see the hut from its summit. But the hut was nowhere: it had vanished. A kind of despair seized us as we wandered hither and thither in the gathering gloom, seeing around us naught but stones:

“A great grey chaos—a land half-made.
Where endless space is, and no life stirreth;
And the soul of a man will recoil afraid
From the sphinx-like visage that Nature weareth.”

Far up in the mist near the glacier the men were calling and halloa-ing, but we had wandered so far now, they could not see us in the waning light. We strayed through this nightmare of a place—it was impossible we could miss two men and a hut, and spend the night among the stones, yet it began to look like it!

At last we saw a figure approaching over a ridge, and gladly went to meet it. The men had imagined that we had by some means got on to the glacier and knowing the danger, they had been up looking for us. Thankfully we followed our guide to the hut—not a quarter of a mile away—and found his mate busy preparing a bush lantern. This serviceable and primitive invention is just a bottle with the bottom knocked out, and a candle stuck in the neck, carried upside-down. And glad we were of it when we plunged once more into the bush. The rain had come on again; no ray of light except our candle illumined the blackness of darkness under the trees. Streams poured down noisily across the path, and from below us came the sullen roar of the Waiho in flood. Drip, drip, overhead, slop, slop, underfoot: we made our way in a darkness that might be felt. As I followed Transome clad in oilskin and sou’-wester, he looked like some hermit of old, bearing his torch aloft, guiding some lost pilgrim to his cell. The light thrown upwards on the wet trees and fern fronds, showing dark forms and the gleam of water, had a weird, theatrical effect, but it left the path itself in utter darkness, and one knew not where to place one’s feet. How were we going to get across that narrow, swaying suspension-bridge like this? To mend matters, when we came to where we thought it was, we could not find it. But at this tragical moment a flickering light, like a will-o’-the-wisp, came through the trees; a cheery voice hailed us, and someone holding up his lantern showed us the supports of the suspension-bridge close over our heads. This friend-in-need guided us safely over the black abyss, and brought us to the inn, and a welcome fire and supper. That was a wild night of wind and rain. The Waiho was in high flood next morning, and one could hear the shock and rumble of the enormous boulders grinding each other in the yellow-brown rush of water. No crossing was possible for horses. However, the sun came out, and we were assured three hours at least would carry off the flood. About eleven o’clock one of the men came to say the horses might attempt it, and we rode across the flat to the ford, and found the river divided into two streams, swirling by tumultuously. Huge brown waves curled in yeasty foam over the boulders—it looked a terrible place to venture in with horses. We were a party of five, and the horses breasted it bravely, but I was glad when we reached the other side. As we turned up the track of yesterday, how different it looked now with the blue sky above, and the leaves shining with moisture. Then we crossed the torrent, and leaving the horses on a shingle island, began a toilsome, muddy scramble up the barricade and on to the glacier. When we had climbed over the mountainous pile of frozen dirt and stones, and stood at last on the great frozen river, the ice proved to be in the worst possible condition. The waves of that river have tossed themselves into every fantastic shape. Glassy pinnacles and serrated edges rear themselves hundreds of feet over deep crevasses—at times it seemed like climbing the

walls of a vast cathedral of crystal—and every step had to be cut. The colouring was marvellous: turquoise and green—and that blue of glacier-pools which is neither—mingled with opal and pink. Since then I have been on several other New Zealand glaciers, but never one of them all like this. In two hours we had not progressed a quarter of a mile, but we were high enough to see its winding course, and the glittering snowfields at its head. Then we turned to look back. An enormous roche moutonnée seemed to block its course to one side, and we looked away beyond this to the waving forest with its crimson ratas, and Okarito lying in a blue haze. But it was cold work standing with one’s feet in a little ice niche, and we could only move one at a time. We had seen enough for a first acquaintance with the glacier, and so we came down and rode back to the inn. Next day we were to start early and see the Fox, a glacier seventeen miles south of this—even larger, I believe, than the Franz Josef.

1. NOTE.—This also has changed in the three years since my visit and been replaced by a bath-house and three modern baths.