Page:A Voyage of Discovery and Research in the Southern and Antarctic Regions Vol 2.djvu/451

Rh the bay. About six miles up, the stream divides into two branches; I followed the one to the left, on the right bank of which a bed of pipe-clay (kotare), twelve feet in thickness, striking S.E. and N.W., crops out from columnar greenstone.

At the missionary station I landed, and crossed over a platform of fern for about two miles to the Keri-Keri falls, which descend over a perpendicular escarpment of basalt eighty or ninety feet high into the ravine below: this is scattered over with fragments of rock, and its banks finely wooded, between which the river continues its winding course. Behind the cascade, and beneath the basalt, is a cave nearly a hundred feet wide, about forty deep, and much the same in height, from which the spray of the falling waters (termed by the natives waianiwaniva, or rainbow-waters), produces a pretty effect, forming a complete curtain of mist in front of the cavern, the roof and floor of which are crusted over with ochraceous clays of various colours. The red ochre (kokowai), and the blue (pukepoto), are used by the natives to paint their skins. On rounding the point at the entrance of the river, on my return to the bay, in the dusk of the evening, the splash of the boat's oars breaking on the silence of nightfall, disturbed a whole colony of cormorants (Phalacrocorax), the kauwau, or preachers of the natives, who had built their nests on the tops of a group of trees, over which they hovered in the wildest confusion and uproar.

In a boat excursion on another occasion, up the river Kawa-Kawa, or Bitter-Bitter, the main continuation of the bay, I landed on the left bank, and proceeded over about four miles of a fern-clad table land to the valley of Waiomio, where some remarkable groups of marble crop out from the adjacent hills of greenstone, to the height of from ten to about forty feet, in castellated forms, like ancient ruins, grown over with trees and shrubs, and occupying a somewhat irregular circle, having the same general bearing, E.N.E. and W.S.W., as the Waitangui marble.