Page:Rambles on the Golden Coast of New Zealand.djvu/47

Rh his feet were, was as much a mystery as it has ever been. They were deep down among the dark waters, for the chart showed here fifty fathoms, and no bottom at that. We had not time to immortalise ourselves by inscribing our names upon his breast-plate, but we took the liberty of chipping off corners of his epaulettes or shoulder blades, and that was just as much as could be done. Had time permitted, and had we been possessed of the proper implements, both the time and the implements might have been well employed, here and in other places; for it is no great stretch of the imagination to believe that if a few blocks of this granite, or of other descriptions which abound upon the West Coast, were landed on Melbourne or Dunedin wharf, a lively interest would be excited as to their utilisation for building or for monumental purposes. It was only a few days ago that headstones and memorial monuments of Aberdeen granite were received in Dunedin. Here there is as much granite as will build all the houses, pave all the streets, contain the records of all the good qualities of all the good people in all the cities of New Zealand; and it is an important item, in the considerations of profit and loss, that in all situations it can be had free of land carriage. It is a beautifully mixed granite, and, if the quarryman could but find a market, he could almost, without lift or purchase, slide it from its natural bed to the vessel’s hold. It is not impossible that a calculation as to the cost of working it, compared with the land carriage and shipment of the Oamaru stone, would prove to be in its favour as the cheaper material of the two. As we were situated we could only look at it and speculate, and from the resemblance of this mass of it to the granite of Bon Accord, we took the liberty of christening it “Lord Aberdeen.” Alongside of it was not altogether the situation for reverie, for, as we lay on the oars, big drops of water fell from the overhang of the cliff, striking one’s skull, if he was foolhardy enough to leave it bare, with the hard crack of a piece of the granite itself. At one part, a stream trickled down the face of the stone, giving it an almost artificial polish; and both up and down this same branch of the Inlet, there were a few picturesque waterfalls, like diamonds in the emerald sides of the hills.

The beach of Sandy Point, to which we returned to sit for half an hour around our “billy,” pendent from a birch-tree branch, is, though pretty, rather a monotonous one, being destitute of shells. Under water, however, we could see cockles, clams, and mussels, though only of the common sort. Small dark wood-hens gazed at us from the beach till we closely approached them, and then tripped into their leafy boudoirs, undisturbed. This was not so, however, with a more attractive little bird—a “crow” or a “jack.” It excited the curiosity of the member of the party who had, if anything, a fancy for natural history, without reference to any particular department, and there was a lively pursuit, in which, I judge, the bird had the best of it, as it was not forthcoming, and because the natural historian, as he re-appeared, did so with the extremities of his shirt-collar at an acute angle of his ears, and his hat “void and without form.”

Some of the party had, in the interval of our absence, landed at the coal-workings, near Gulche’s Head, and simultaneously with them landed Mr Coates, Mr Hutcheson, and Mr Beverly, after an eleven days’ hazardous journey of exploration northward. In