Page:Picturesque New Zealand, 1913.djvu/317

Rh its environs did not afford a cheerful prospect. Kingston itself was only a hamlet, and about the only object of beauty in its neighborhood was the blue of the lake. On the benches and hills above the lake were only dark projecting ledges and boulders, tussock sward, and scrubby growth of leafy plants.

The steamer was not long out, however, until there was an improvement. Up the lake's east side about five miles was a tilted ridge with three rough divisions. It was a peaked outcrop with a history.

"That is the Devil's Staircase," said an old miner to me. "A hundred head of fat cattle rolled off there into the lake forty years ago. They were being driven to Queenstown, when one of them became frightened and plunged over the cliffs, and the others followed."

On the west side of the lake, opposite to the Devil's Staircase, were the broken forms of Mount Dick and the Bay Peaks, both exposing high perpendicular walls terminating in sharp points six thousand feet above the sea. On the same side were the Bayonet Peaks, a collection of high and huge pinnacles that looked like the half-buried ruins of a mighty temple or of a cemetery of prehistoric giants. The dark cliffs, turrets, columns, and splintered crags seemed fit dwelling-places for ghostly tribes.

The most striking spectacle en route to Queenstown were the Remarkables, a range on the eastern shore, beginning at or near the Devil's Staircase and running to the Kawarau River, Wakatipu's outlet. As seen from