Page:Our New Zealand Cousins.djvu/47

 the rapid clouds flit past, and let the sunshafts dart far into the nooks, where the most exquisite forms of fern life are "wasting their sweetness." The defile here is 830 feet deep from where the coach passes, and on the other side of the narrow neck of land over which we roll, another equally deep and equally lovely valley spreads its beauties before our admiring eyes.

Then we enter the hoary, silent bush, and for twelve miles we drive through a perfect avenue of delights. Here is the giant pittosperum: there the tall totarah. Multitudes of ratas, having coiled round some fated giant of the forest, with their Laocoon-like embrace, now rear aloft their bloated girth; and all around are ferns, creepers, llianas, orchids, trailing drapery, exquisite mosses, and all the bewildering beauty of the indescribable bush.

For nearly two hours, we wend our entranced way through this realm of enchantment. Every revolution of the silent wheels over the soft, yielding, but springy forest-road, reveals some fresh charm, some rarer vision of sylvan beauty. And yet it is very still. No sound of bird, no ring of axe here. All is still, as if under a spell—and insensibly we become hushed and almost awed, as we look up to the giant height of the mossy pines and totaras, or peer into the shadowy arcades where exquisite ferns and creepers trail their leafy luxuriance over the rotting tree-trunks, as if to hide the evidences of decay beneath their living mantle of velvety green.