Page:Picturesque New Zealand, 1913.djvu/26

 2 and the Maori. New Zealand is, indeed, a continent in miniature. No other country of the world has so great a variety of scenic charms within so small a compass. This insular unit of the British Empire is little larger than Colorado. Yet it has mountains that rival the Alps of Switzerland, and sounds that recall the fiords of Norway. It has weird fire-born wonders exceeding in extent those of the Yellowstone National Park; it has canyons with depths matching those of the Yosemite and the Grand Canyon of Arizona. In the wealth of its flora, in the poverty of its mammalia, and in its peculiar flightless avi-fauna, it is one of the most remarkable countries of the earth. In the awe-inspiring, the majestic, the enchanting, the unique, Aotearoa abounds; in diversity it is equally rich.

Not all that I had read of New Zealand did I find there. Some of the glories detailed had departed with the advance of settlement. Further, some extollers of New Zealand scenery had exaggerated; others had misplaced words of praise, applying them to hills and deforested mountains in a delirium that would have been more excusable in descriptions of the shadowy lakes and sounds and the glittering, ice-worn Alps.

But in accounts of New Zealand's physical magnificence delirious touches may be expected, especially from the New Zealander; The New Zealander who knows Niu Tirani's "Cloud Piercer" and its myriad satellites, its fiords of lake and sea, and the moss and fern-grown cliffs of its rushing canyon rivers, is proud of nature's