Page:Our New Zealand Cousins.djvu/148

 Anon the sun bursts through the driving scud, and for an instant the gleam and glitter, the sheen and radiance, the play of glowing brightness and gloomy shadow, are positively bewildering, and superlatives are exhausted in the attempt to render any of the faintest conception of the absorbing witchery of the fairy display.

Through a long, dark, curved tunnel we dash. We spin across the narrow neck named Siberia, where at times the wind shrieks like as if all the squadrons of the "Prince of the Power of the Air" were hurling themselves upon the rugged rocks in the attempt to dash them into pieces. Great stones hurtle through the air at times. It was here that terrible accident took place, when the train was lifted bodily from the track by the hurricane, and many lives were lost. Since then the naked spur has been protected by high, strong barricade fences.

But what a work has this been! How could the surveyors have possibly come down these beetling cliffs? What a wild chaos is here! Crags, cascades, towering heights, and dizzy steeps. It beats the western ghats of Bombay for wild majesty.

And the mists! Those columns of vapour on the steep mountain sides. "He but toucheth the hills and they do smoke." Look up or down the gorge as you will, we seem shut in from the outer world as by the fiat of some fell magician, with impassable barriers of the wildest rock and forest.