Page:Picturesque New Zealand, 1913.djvu/290

186 Peaks, each terminating more than a mile above the sea. In the left foreground a mountain thrust up an immense knob similar to the neck of a short, thick bottle. Then my eyes rested on a clear, silent river flowing into the lake. It was the Clinton, which later, in a deep canyon dripping with waterfalls and heaped and strewn with mountain wreckage from frozen snowbanks, I was to see turbulently cutting away its banks, dashing madly against great boulders, and finally dwindling to a mere creek beneath the shadows of Mount Hart and Balloon Peak. Down this river an appalling rush of water sometimes comes, and the same is true of creeks discharging into the lake. It was one of these which, changing its course, isolated the old wharf at the lake's head and made it necessary to build another. "At three o'clock on that day," the captain told me, "I could walk across it without getting my feet wet; but at four it was a torrent." At the edge of Te Anau's head starts Milford Track, ending at Milford Sound, about thirty-three miles distant. The first stage is a level stretch half a mile long ending at the Glade House, a State hotel on the left bank of the Clinton. From this point and for miles up the canyon, is one of the most beautiful forest walks in the world. The trees wear bouquets. The path is shaded by beech trees, and many of them are decked with the parasitical mistletoe. Fastening itself on trunk or limb, the plant blossoms into a great bunch of scarlet, forming one of the finest forest effects imaginable. For miles