Page:Picturesque New Zealand, 1913.djvu/331

Rh silt and with it filling valleys and lakes. Here are great glacial beds filled with white lakes; forest-rimmed blue lakes; and wild streams that are full almost to the top of their banks one week and are dry the next. Here glacial débris is heaped to mountain heights; trees grow where once the ocean rolled; hot springs "ooze from decomposing sulphides in the pressure-heated strata"; and here are gold and greenstone, the koura and pounamu of the Maoris. The heart of the Southern Alps can be reached via the passes of Westland, but the tourist routes thereto are on the east, chiefly from the railway terminals at Kurow, 120 miles from Dunedin, and at Fairlie, 139 miles from Christchurch. The main route is via Fairlie, which is ninety-six miles from the Hermitage, the State hotel near Mount Cook. From Fairlie the Hermitage is reached in one day by motor-coaches. From Timaru—where all passengers via Fairlie change trains—to Fairlie the railway passes through a rich wheat district, a flat and rolling country of pleasing appearance and good roads. From the train the passenger may see wheat ripening while snow falls on the Two Thumb Range, northwest of Fairlie, on the lower slopes of which, in winter, votaries of the ski disport.

From Fairlie to the Hermitage it is a devious and, in the main, a dreary road, especially after leaving Burke Pass, which crosses the Two Thumb Range about fourteen miles from Fairlie. Practically all the way the road