Page:Letters from New Zealand (Harper).djvu/19

Rh in this well-watered country; a land of brooks and fountains which water the hills, and a variety of ferns. In the distance in the deep mountain valleys and on the hill sides are extensive forests of what I take to be pines. I think if you tried to sketch it in water colours you would have to have first a general wash of yellowish brown, with indigo rather than blue for all green foliage; and you would find in the clear hard quallty of the atmosphere an absence of the soft purple and blue shadows which lend such beauty to our home scenery.

Now for the western view from my rocky seat, different in contour but not in general colouring; a vast expanse of plain forming the northern end of the Canterbury plains, ending on the North-east in the Pacific Ocean. It seems absolutely flat, but I believe it rises a good deal as it approaches the outlying flanks of the Southern Alps which form the great western "Divide" of the Canterbury province; their snow-capped peaks cannot be less than seventy miles from where I was sitting, but in this clear atmosphere they scarcely seemed half that distance. Imagine, as a foreground, a sort of yellowish brown carpet of tussock grass, here and there lit up with ribbons of waterways sparkling in the sunlight; at its North-eastern edge a curve of fifty miles of sand, fringed with breaking foam, losing itself in the distance against the great rocky headland of the "Kaikoura" mountains. The Kaikouras are over 5,000 feet in height, a splendid bulwark meeting the waves of the Pacific, known in the Maori tongue as the "Lookers on." On the plain, some eight miles away, I could make out a few scattered houses which so far form the town of Christchurch; here and there evidences of cultivation, a