Page:Rambles on the Golden Coast of New Zealand.djvu/46

30 in slumber on board, or idleness on the beach, than in seeing the marvels of Creation in Preservation Inlet; and, as His Honour did not refuse the use of one of the boats, a party started at two o’clock in the morning to the head waters of the Inlet.

The Inlet is studded with islands. Some of these, with the facilities for fishing by which they are surrounded, afford ample space for comfortable homes to even more dainty people than the hard-working and hybrid race who, in the Northern and Western Islands of Scotland, are content, or compelled, to dwell on a patch of peatmoss, and to obtain a precarious livelihood from the resources of a rougher sea. Others are mere miniature islets, or mammoth flower-pots, such as lend a quaint charm to the scenery of the Thousand Islands of the St Lawrence. The smaller of them are almost level with the sea—the very peaks of hills protruding above the water-level; and though apparently liable to the surge of the ocean, concealed in a covering of vegetation—usually shrubbery of every variety, but often a group of the birch trees, distinguishable by their candelabra branches, or the iron-wood, at this season as easily recognised by its attractive scarlet flower. They were just tipped with the first streak of daylight, as we passed up towards the shaded and frowning cliffs of the upper waters of the Sound. To reach these we had to row towards the south side of the Inlet, where the cliffs descend almost precipitously from the high terrace-land beyond. On the north side, the hills are not actually precipitous, but their slope is of inconsiderable value, so far as affording a footing for man, or the implements of agriculture, even if the bush were not there. After two hours’ pulling between cliffs on the one side, and on the other side the densely wooded shores of a peculiar peninsula by which the Inlet is divided, we reached a spot marked on the chart as Sandy Point. The name is not exactly descriptive of the beach, for it consists of yellowish granite gravel, of almost uniform size and angular form—not by any means a bad substitute, if it were within reach of a City Inspector, for the best screened road metal that he could procure. It was half-tide when we landed, and the beach—welcome to us by its very exception to the prevalence of the perpendicular in every object around—was so well defined by the vegetation, and the water of the Inlet, and so sweetly kept by the ripples of the tide, as to look more like a well-kept drive in a nobleman’s domain than the débris of a stream, which, with 400 or 500 acres of bush behind, it evidently is. Leaving one or two of the party at this spot to “boil the billy,” we pulled still farther up the Inlet till we entered the waters of Long Sound—darkened by the influx of the stream at its extremity, and the shade of the surrounding hills, 2000 and 3000 ft. high. To the practical man, the aspect of this locality is not an enticing one—the hills high and precipitous, so bare of soil upon their sides as to defy the growth of vegetation, and with grass growing only towards the summits. Nature, with a due regard to decency, endeavouring to cover its own nakedness, wherever a rag will hang. The whole formation is apparently granitic.

Returning, we pulled in towards a bare granite cliff, and tried it with the hammer. There was one grand mass of it free from vegetation and in form somewhat resembling a man’s head and shoulders—it might be Atlas himself holding up the world. Where