Page:Our New Zealand Cousins.djvu/202

 Take this mountain-side now, for instance. Let me try, however faintly and inadequately, to present it to you. It displays to the beholder an epitome of every varied feature of Alpine scenery; from the calm blue lake on which we float the eye seeks the skirting of wave-worn lichened rock. The mossy weather-worn boulders girdle the strand, draped in part by fern, and shadowed by the hill myrtle and manukau scrub; next the bracken-covered slopes, with their dull, dead greenery; the ridgy coping beyond, dipping yonder into a warm bosom, set thick with birch and boughy trees; above that again the silvery sparkle of a hill torrent with a sheen and glitter at every successive step, as the water leaps from ledge to ledge, lighting up the whole picture; all around and above, in swelling ridges and billowy bosses, the dun-brown stunted herbage spreads, with here and there a warty excrescence as the bed-rock bursts through the shrivelled, shrunken skin, and presents its nakedness, which the trailing mists hasten to cover. Now, as the eye ranges higher, the mists gather thicker. The clouds kiss the bare patches. The shroud and pall of vaporous film drapes the scarred face with its clinging cerements; and higher up, peeping through the ever-shifting upper strata of the trailing gauze, the gleaming peak itself robed in eternal snows, lifts up its silent witness to the heavens, a mute protest one might fancy against the smirched and sullied creation of the lower firmament.