Page:A Voyage of Discovery and Research in the Southern and Antarctic Regions Vol 2.djvu/122

102 to be accomplished on foot, because our instruments might sustain injury from the jolting of a horse, and were too valuable to be trusted to any other hands, it required all the consideration of some one well acquainted with the country, and with our powers of enduring the fatigue of travelling along the narrow native paths, to dispose of our time to the best advantage.

We agreed first to visit the Lake Mapere at Mawe, and having sent our people off early the next morning with the small boat and seine, we started at 9, and after half an hour's smart walking were obliged to take shelter from a very heavy fall of rain in a small neat chapel which the Christian natives had themselves built of wood in one of their stone pahs, and in which, Mr. Taylor informed us, one of the native schoolmasters read the church service twice every Sunday. Some of the cottages were remarkably clean and tidy, and their gardens, containing peach trees and the Cape gooseberry, in much better order than we had seen in other places. At a distance of five or six miles from Waimati, after passing through a difficult marshy jungle, we arrived at the edge of the lake.

It is a fine sheet of water, between two and three miles in diameter, or perhaps more, and thickly wooded to the water's edge. It is said to be very shallow, and there are many superstitious traditions regarding its origin, too idle and absurd to be mentioned; yet it seems certain that it covers the