Page:Picturesque New Zealand, 1913.djvu/312

202 In a region of desolate grandeur, where age is deeply written on lofty mountains of mica schist that show the grinding, planing power of glaciers, lies New Zealand's Lucerne, Wakatipu, its longest and third largest lake. About fifty miles long and averaging little more than two miles in width, it looks like an enormous crank handle. For twenty miles it runs north, then turning west for twelve miles, it runs north again for another score of miles. It lies more than a thousand feet above the sea, and it has a maximum depth of twelve hundred and forty feet. Azure blue, cobalt blue, and the blue of coral seas are seen in its waters; and on the highest summits of the practically treeless ranges that wall it in, snow exists at all times of the year.

Above Wakatipu rise rock terraces hundreds of feet long, which lead to peaks from five thousand to nearly eight thousand feet high. Excepting near the lake's head, only isolated groves of trees are seen, and even there is desolation, for the beech forests have been devastated by fire. The tussocks, which look like sprinkled dust as they yellow on the mountains, the bracken fern, the tutu, and the Wild Irishman, can do little to diminish the general aspect of cheerlessness, even when assisted by the white gentian flower, the snowberry, the coprosmas, and veronica. Geologists say that Wakatipu occupies the bed of a glacier, and that once it was much higher and larger; but according to Maori mythology they are partly wrong. The South Island Maoris have a tradition which