Page:Our New Zealand Cousins.djvu/213

 Through a temporary rift in the grey mist, the gaunt hills show their bare, naked, ugly backs, lacerated with gaping scars. All the glamour of the kindly drapery of snow has vanished under the pitiless pelting of the rain. Great landslips have laid bare the blue shale-beds on the mountain sides. The chasms and abyssmal [sic] depths look the very acme of wild unrelieved desolation. There is not a bright tint. The only signs of motion are the foaming cascades tearing down the gullies, their silvery streaks looking like the white locks of angry furies trailing over the barren jagged clefts. The only sign of life is where a ghostly gull, sated with the flesh of some poisoned rabbits, wings his heavy flight athwart the black-blue background of dripping rock.

We seem to be floating above the clouds, and to be dipping into a sea of mist. Yonder is a glorious peep! A rift in the cloud with a spumy circle of cirrhus edges, reveals a glimpse of a snowy peak, far, far aloft. It looks, as we might fancy, the face of a veteran warrior, with a few lyart locks scattered thinly over his brow, to gaze at us through the gauzy curtains of an hospital window.

Now we cross the Arrow, swift as its name portends; roaring and foaming deep down in its drumly channel. Look at the old workings! What Titan's toil has been here! It looks as if a pack of prediluvian monsters had been madly tearing at the banks. The valley is riven and torn and trenched and furrowed in all directions. Every furlong of the way now for the next thirty