Page:Rambles on the Golden Coast of New Zealand.djvu/128

98 Still I am glad to mount the box-seat once more, and muffle myself up from the keen breeze which comes from the west.

“I think that this is a good case for a modern Mark Tapley, and I begin to wish that I had imitated Anthony Trollope, who never made this journey, but wrote his charming account from the descriptions given him by the warriors at Christchurch. Is it for this that I have come many miles to see the Otira Gorge? I dose, and fancy myself a glacier, and awake with my intellects frozen. The cold has increased, and there is six inches of snow on the ground. We are now at the top of the saddle of ‘Arthur’s Pass,’ 3200 ft. high. Here is the division of the eastern and western watersheds, and of Canterbury and Westland. The sun rises. It is somewhere there behind the clouds. There is light, and the snow ceases a little. ‘We go down 1500 ft. in a very short time,’ says Davis. The brakes are hard down, and then full speed ahead. Below us is one great sea of fog and mist, into which we appear plunging. Down, and down at full gallop. We turn round sharp corners, which, with the certainty of what would happen if anything broke, makes the nervous shiver. There is a ‘Devil’s Elbow’ in the beautiful drive over the hills from Adelaide. There are a dozen Devil's Elbows here. Down, and down. I have seen nothing like it but the Guyger Grade. All the while the cheery voice of Arthur Davis—gift of his Cambrian ancestors—rings out cheerily. It is contagious. I toss the stump of my cigar over the cliff—the bottom a thousand feet below. No matter Jadis les rois, I burst out, when a great snowflake sweeps down my throat, and nearly chokes me. ‘Hurrah! Come up, my beauties,’ yells Davis, as he turns the coach round a corner which seems something like the apex of the pon asinoirum. We are over the saddle of Arthur’s Pass, and in the eastern end of the Otira Gorge.”

Then the much-travelled “Vagabond” is fairly taken aback at the grandeur of the scenery at this particular point, and proceeds to give the following graphic description:—“Now the dawn breaks fully, and I am fully rewarded for all my trouble and the petty trials endured. Now I experience the culmination of all the beauties I have seen in New Zealand—of all the beauties I have seen under the Southern Cross. Never to be effaced from my memory a sight worth a journey over land and sea—worth a voyage from the old world—worth hardships and discomforts—worth a king’s ransom—and yet which is within ten days of Melbourne or Sydney, and can be enjoyed for a trifling cost. New Zealand is a country of surprises in the beautiful; the southern and northern lake districts have each their admirers; but none can say they know this country thoroughly till they have been this drive to the West Coast. Finis coronat opus.

“This is the narrowest of passes; the Otira is a rapid stream, dashing over a rocky bed, whilst the mountains arise on each side thousands of feet above us, clothed everywhere with foliage which crowns the beauty of form and outline, giving light and colour to what otherwise would be like the Kawararu Gorge—grand but terrible. The character of the flora is changed, now that we are on the western slope; no longer the birch, with its sombre green, but red and white pines, giant fuschia trees, the rata and