Page:Our New Zealand Cousins.djvu/200

 in all the lake district. The scene now is one of unrelieved desolation.

At intervals, as the steamer progresses, a white gleam of silvery foam comes streaking down through the fern, and flashes over the rocks, marking the descent of some tumbling cascade from the melting snows on the heights. After heavy rains the hillsides are just one chaos of hissing, roaring, leaping water. Every gully becomes a gleaming torrent. Every rocky buttress is enveloped in seething, churning, foam. The crash and roar of landslips is heard above the swishing boom of the cataracts, and the wild Walpurgis of the angry elements is held, as earth and lake and sky blend in one mad medley of convulsive sound and commingling strife.

Now we have the lake scenery in all its weird presentment. Words utterly fail to describe the savage grandeur of the hills above the Greenstone River, which here comes rolling its brown waters through a deep black cleft in the mountains. Gusts of crapy mist are creeping, snaky-like, up the gorge. The sides of the defile are wooded with a dark forest mass, in fit keeping with its surroundings. What a startling contrast to look upward from this funereal sombreness, and gaze on the immaculate majesty of the still, lone mountain crags, piercing their flaming crests through the grey canopy of cloud.

A surveyed track leads through the Greenstone Valley to Martin's Bay, on the West Coast, only some fifty or sixty miles distant. My good friend