Page:A Voyage of Discovery and Research in the Southern and Antarctic Regions Vol 2.djvu/449

Rh Kotaritari, a small kingfisher (Alcedo cyanea), whilst watching for its prey in the waters beneath.

In an excursion to Waimate, a missionary station, about fifteen miles inland of the bay, my course lay over hills about seven or eight hundred feet in height, crested with trees, or clothed with fern (Pteris esculenta),—once constituting the main subsistence of the natives,—and intersected by deep and densely wooded ravines. On crossing the second range of hills, I came upon the fern-clad plateau of the Waimate, and made a detour to the left, to examine some limestone rocks, cropping out from the bed of the Waitangui River, which is here about thirty feet wide; and the current setting so rapidly round the sharp curve it makes between its steep and wooded banks, that the horse I rode lost his footing, and had some difficulty in stemming it, whilst I chipped off specimens from two highly crystalline blocks of white marble, rising four or five feet above the centre of the stream, which ran S.W. and N.E.; the strike of the bed of limestone being E.N.E. and W.S.W., but no discernible dip.

On the approach to Waimate, emerging from a narrow belt of wood, ornamented by a large graceful tree-fern, the settlement, with its neat new church, farms, and houses enclosed in flower-gardens, having a thoroughly English aspect, all at once burst upon the view, amidst the surrounding fern-clad region, like an oasis in the desert. The decomposing greenstone in the vicinity presents a globular jointed structure, spherical masses of which, resembling cannon-balls, lay scattered about the surface of the soil, near a forest of the Kaudi pine (Dammara Australis), the only cone-bearing pine in the island, and confined to its northern part, where the stiff clayey soil seems favourable to its growth; it is mostly found in hilly situations, in the vicinity of the sea, usually with a quantity of its yellow transparent resin (pare) imbedded at its base. The thirty-eighth degree of south latitude is about the limit of its geographical range.