Through South Westland/Part 1/Chapter 8

by A. Maud Moreland

CHAPTER VIII.

THE LAST STAGE.

The glory from the Western hills
Falls fading, spark on spark,
Only a mighty sadness fills
The spaces of the dark.

G. C. Whitney.

The mist floating in the valley was very tantalizing, hiding so much I longed to see. The scene was changing entirely. We were now riding up a wide river-bed of grey sands and gravel; crossing and re-crossing, but never swimming. Then the gorge opened into a wide valley, stretching away on our left, to high snow mountains, and unexplored peaks and glaciers. The Lansborough river comes down here, bringing the main body of water to the Haast, and it is said it was due to a mistake that the small river entering it on the right was named after Sir Julius Von Haast. He was the first to penetrate through these mountains from sea to sea. It is getting a long time ago now, but I don’t think the track can have changed much since the day when he and his men forced their way through!

The Lansborough takes its rise in the Southern Alps, where a net-work of glaciers feeds many small rivers, some of which find outlet towards Hunter’s river and Lake Hawea eastwards, while

others drain into the Lansborough valley. Our course was up the smaller valley to the right. Before us lay a desolate broken bit of country, and here, without Ted, inevitably we should have been lost, for one might be three or four miles from the track without knowing. He never hesitated; he and his mare pressed on, through the wild scrub and shingle flats at the junction of the rivers, across water or dry land, and we followed confidently. There was, he told us, an old track along the hills, long since spoiled by landslips, and now overgrown and impossible for horses—that must have been where the surveyor got the biddies, I thought.

As we entered the Upper Haast the sun broke through completely. Looking back, we saw the snow-fields of the Lansborough glittering against the glorious blue, with a dark mass of precipitous mountains at the junction of the valleys. No longer was the Haast a hungry, treacherous river. Here it was a lovely blue stream, widening in places to broad reaches of quiet water, where the paradise ducks swam with their almost grown-up families, uttering their plaintive cry and rising and flying short distances as we disturbed them. It is a cry in keeping with the loneliness of Nature among these untrodden hills. Before us stretched a fair green lawn—so smooth it seemed almost as if it had been cut—surrounded no longer by the western bush. Here grew the first outliers of the beech forests of the eastern slopes. The dense junglegrowth was no more, and other signs began to show themselves. Instead of cantering over that smooth, green lawn, we had to go very carefully. It was riddled with rabbit-holes. The rabbits were there in hundreds, popping about—grey, yellow, and black, and with them a colony of English starlings.

When we left this fair spot behind us, we entered a narrow gorge, passing near its entrance the second hut—a more miserable and forlorn erection than the Clark, where we had spent the night. Deep in the bottom of the ravine a tumbling torrent roared and plunged. The rock walls in places overhung the path, propped up once or twice by tree-trunks; there was only just room to pass under without dismounting. Our guide left us here to go on ahead to a second camp. The one and only bridge in the pass, thrown across an otherwise impassable torrent, was threatening to give way, and another brother of Ted’s, with five or six men, were felling timber to build a new one. The bridge carried us safely over at the junction of two waterfalls, where it was thrown across between creeper-grown precipices. Here the bush was pine again, and very heavy; big rimus lay about, stripped of their branches, ready to be sawn up and hauled into position. High above, on a rocky ledge, a row of small tents betokened the permanent camp, but the men were far afield, for the suitable trees have to be sought often at a great distance. A little beyond this lies the Divide,

where the deer-country begins. We were told that occasionally the stags will wander thus far, but that they will never enter the western forests, and though seen at the bridge, they never cross it. Ted’s mare was standing patiently where he had left her by the tents, and we dismounted and awaited the upshot of events. He came back in a little while with a message from “the boss” to say we were to make ourselves at home and have our breakfast—but it was nearer ten o’clock than breakfast time! In methodical fashion he proceeded to obey these injunctions; washed up plates and mugs; foraged for some cold roast mutton and bread, and set the billy to boil. He then called us and directed me where to sit; he had set out a bench with knives and forks, plates and spoons, and we felt quite civilized. He gave the cold mutton to Transome, but for me was reserved cold goose. Truly no one could have been better taken care of! Then the men came back to lunch, and showed me all their camp arrangements, and their bunks. One of them, stooping, pulled out a square packing-case from under one of them. “We couldn’t get along without that,” he said; “that’s the library.” It was full of papers, some old books and “sixpennies,” and they all bore marks of constant reading.

After I got back I sent a parcel of books and magazines as a contribution to the library; but I never heard if it reached its destination The “boss” invited us to go down into the Wills River gorge to see the falls. Here the whole volume of the river plunges between narrow, rock walls—a glorious melée of tumbling foam and bright green water. Everything was drenched with spray, and the climb back over slippery rock through wet creepers and ferns was hard work. And then we said good-bye to these last Westland friends, and started on the final stage. That night we would go to bed in the ordinary way, in ordinary beds, having probably dined off excellent Otago mutton. I am afraid no real gratitude was in my heart for these mercies. The surveyor sleeping happily in the bush: the schoolmaster teaching those few lambs in the wilderness: my friends among the settlers’ wives . . . . all had helped to spoil me for the return to the routine of daily life.

It was much more of a climb now, though the track was at no point too steep to ride, and we followed each other in single file. A cloudless sky above, rushing water on all hands, and, except for that, the deep silence of the bush. Gradually it had lost its tropical look, and we came to bare cliffs where the mountains seemed to come down on one’s head. Coming up a narrow gorge we rounded a shoulder of cliff, and saw high up the opposite mountain, the Haast glacier—not the one of that name farther north. This one seemed to topple over a razor-back mountain, poising itself like the crest of a mighty wave some thousands of feet above us. We could not see

whence it came—a shoulder of snow-capped mountain intervened—but the more we scanned it through the glasses the stranger it appeared. As we surmounted the next ridge above a sunny pool with shingly bottom, the streams were still all running west, but beyond the ridge, lo! they ran east, down to a wide valley where Ted told us the Fish river ran. The beech forest had finally conquered, and the hills rolled away, evenly furred with dark, monotonous green. A stake by the track marked the junction of Westland with Otago.

Alas, I viewed it with no feeling of exultation! It was only by the promise we should come again and complete that unfinished stage of the Main South Road that Transome roused me to any feeling of satisfaction. I let the others go on with the horses down the steep descent, preferring to walk. But the track was hot and dry, and the yellow clay along the sides, was cracked with heat. Under the beeches was but “a ragged penury of shade”; their little evergreen leaves looked so parched and leathery after the cool, damp forest, and I was glad to get down to the horses waiting at the ford.

Not thus had I walked down many a descent in Westland—where the great trees made a shadowy tunnel, and waters sprayed one from among the ferns. We cantered fast over stretches of grass by the river till we came to a real road. Then the hills fell back, and the forest gradually came to an end. Sheep pasture took its place with cornfields and hay fields along the wide valley. There were English trees now clustering round little homesteads, and a sunny stretch of country ended at a turquoise-blue line. There lay Lake Wanaka, closed all round by bare mountains which rose in broken peaks and rugged outlines to the south. Verily a different world. The horses seemed to like the change and cantered fast.

Ted would have liked to show the superiority of his mare, and we raced for a stretch, but it was not fair to the horses after their long climb. We drew rein and very soberly we arrived at the Widow Pipson’s. She was standing under the verandah of a little house set in the midst of a field of waving grass; and whether she expected us or not, I don’t know—there had been no one to tell her—but she evinced no surprise, and took me into a sweet little room, supplying all my wants. When I joined the others we sat down to a most appetizing meal. I remember there were chops, and I remember, too, Ted continuing his care of my wants—under all circumstances he was the same competent, commanding person; he ought to have been a commissariat officer or a field-marshal.

Afterwards we stood outside in the warm, still air, watching the setting sun colour the bare mountains hemming in the valley—first blue, then gold, then pink, and lastly grey; and when the hush of evening came with the dusk, we went inside to write our long-delayed letters and diaries, and “so to bed.”

And though next day was not really to be our last—for we had seven more days’ travelling—yet to me it was the end, and when we said good-bye to Ted, it was good-bye to Westland and all it had come to mean to me.

Of Wanaka, among its blue mountains, I will not write; or of that long day riding round the base of the rugged hills that enclose Hawea, where the storms chased each other, lashing the steel-blue waters into foam. Or of the golden evening that followed, when we crossed the Hawea plain and saw the harvesters in blue dungarees binding the yellow corn; or of straight roads leading to little homesteads, dotted about in their formal fir plantations, all rather parched and dusty and bounded by sun-baked hills. I saw it all with a sick longing for the cool dim forest, for the ever-murmuring waters, for the sights and sounds I had learned to love:

“Lost is the sense of noiseless, sweet escape
From dust of stony plains, from sun and gale,
When the feet tread where shade and silence drape
The stems with peace beneath the leafy veil,
Or when a pleasant rustling stirs each shape
Creeping with whisperings that rise and fail
Through labyrinths half-lit by chequered play
Of light on golden moss now burned away.!”

I had entered the promised land. I had seen a world as it was before man came there; in after years it could never be quite the same again. For if I went back to it, I might not find the Fairy Land of my dreams. The forest world must give place before the fire and the axe, but the memory of it, as I saw it in my brief sojourn, can never pass away.

So, as the sun sank behind the purple barrier of the western mountains, out-lining their edges in gold: and their long shadows stretched across the plain: and the harvesters came back in the gloaming: I said. Farewell.