Page:Mannering - With axe and rope in the New Zealand Alps.djvu/117

Rh its white garment of snow, hiding its beauties until the hand of gentle spring once more wakens them to burst forth anew in all their resplendent glory.

Proceeding up the valley between these magnificent mountains we kept moving onward in a northeasterly direction under the flanks of the Malte Brun Range, on to whose slopes we were now and then forced by encroaching streams from the meandering river, and we arrived early in the afternoon at a large boulder-fan issuing from a rocky gorge above, whence a magnificent waterfall descended. Here we boiled the 'billy' and lunched, making an inspection of the scene, which is one of the grandest beauty.

Far up in the heavens stands out a noble peak of the Malte Brun Range, rising out of a glacier which nestles in a basin of rock and bristles with séracs and pinnacles of blue ice pouring into the gorge below, from whence issues an imposing waterfall of seventy or eighty feet, sending up clouds of spray and drenching all within its immediate vicinity. From long action of the water an almost semicircular cylinder about ten feet in circumference has been worn into the solid rock, and the force of water descending this strange funnel seems to drive out in one direction a current of air which carries the spray with it.

All around this fall the vegetation is most luxuriant, and the rocks are covered with flowering plants in great profusion, and, in parts where the spray falls, plants, rare elsewhere, notably the myosotis, flourish in the abundant moisture.

Taking a more northerly direction we came to the terminal face of the glacier, which by aneroid measure-