Page:Picturesque New Zealand, 1913.djvu/359

Rh In Australasia, boiling the billy is a very common practice, in the bush, in camp, on the tramp, on goldfields and kauri-gum-fields, and in many other places. The billy is a black-faced pail in which water is boiled for tea and in which tea is brewed. The blacker the billy the better, a sable countenance being proof of long and honorable service and lending flavor to the tea.

Not all the superb outings of the Southern Alps are confined to the vicinity of Mount Cook. One of the best of New Zealand's Alpine tours is over the Alps to Westland, to the coast of gold and greenstone, and to the land of Seddon. From the treeless ranges of the east to the leafy luxuriance of the west is a wonderful transformation. Here frozen sterility meets fertility supporting tree and fern, palm and orchid. Here are swift gold-bearing rivers, the Grey, the Arahura, the Waiho; here are lakes famed for their shadow pictures, the Kanieri, the Mapourika, the Mahinapua; other lakes deeply set in glacier's bed, and lakes that are shallow and sedge-lined; and here is the blue of foliaged mountains, and the scent of many flowers.

And finally, in a latitude corresponding to that of the central part of New York State, are the beautiful Fox and Franz Josef Glaciers, the first nearly ten miles long, the other a mile and a quarter shorter. Their grooves are deep and abrupt; in their caverns and fissures are the shades of a soft, ethereal blue; and in the forests above them the fiery-hued rata blossom contrasts vividly with the shimmering white below.