Page:Picturesque New Zealand, 1913.djvu/25



down beneath the Southern Cross, in the region of fabled Lemuria, is a long, bright land; a land of wondrous beauty and pleasing variety. There argent slopes of lofty ranges sweep down to forests of ineffable loveliness that shelter palm and fern and flowering tree. There great glaciers, littered with their rocky thefts from adjacent mountains, perpetually grind and groove, and eventually feed roaring, tawny rivers. There inroading sea and straggling lake, that fill ice-carved basins terminating far below the tides, form pictures of wild and captivating beauty.

In this land are astonishing contrasts. There the weird and the beautiful are seen side by side; fire and steam near snow and ice; spouting geyser beside cold stream; boiling, sputtering mud adjoining still, translucent depths.

Such, and much more, I found in months of travel in the Dominion of New Zealand, "The Long White Cloud," "The Far-stretching Land"; a land of the moa