Page:Rambles on the Golden Coast of New Zealand.djvu/67

Rh conceive, and one can readily believe the stories of captains who have taken shelter here, as to the perfect deluge which comes from the hill-sides in a storm, or the testimony of the Admiralty Surveyors, that, after a heavy rain, the sea was found to be covered with fresh water, several feet deep.

One of the eccentric beauties of the scene is the irregularity with which vegetation is disposed, or displayed, on the steep sides of the hills. Occasionally the cliffs are too abrupt for flora or for shrubbery to find a footing. On others they are deterred by the cold companionship of the snow-fed streams, or are ruthlessly swept away by the sudden avalanche. Elsewhere the level is too high, or the surroundings are not congenial, for the growth of any vegetation but that of the most meagre kind. But wherever a footing is to be had, there vegetation asserts itself, and, in every shade of Nature’s green, clothes the white or the grey rocks of the cliffs, or surrounds the errant patches of snow which have slipped from the parent fields above, and deposited themselves in solitude, or in groups upon the mountain side, until they are again separated and slid off to a lower level, to wither away into the waters of the streams.

Throughout the length of the Sound there are only the most trifling portions of beach, usually formed by slips from the hills; and, from their appearance, it is just possible that, by the weight of half-a-dozen men, they might be removed from their pendant position, and be precipitated to the bottom, fathoms below. Several of the cliffs indicate that masses of rock, equal to hundreds of thousands of tons, have at some time become detached, and have subsided into the sea; yet, at these very places, the soundings show one hundred and eighty fathoms, and no bottom.

At the upper extremity of the Sound there are two small circular harbours, called Fresh Water Basins, from the fact that, unless it is at high tide, the water in them is usually fresh; and in the first of these the “Geelong” anchored. She entered this strikingly picturesque place of anchorage at half-flood, the bar having then four-and-a-half fathoms of water upon it, and she dropped anchor in seven fathoms. It is a tiny harbour, just about capable of holding three such vessels as the “Geelong;” but its surroundings are stupendous.

One of the objects nearest to our anchorage, and one of the most attractive in the Sound, except its own grand physical features, is a waterfall of considerable proportions, and 540 ft. high. It is a waterfall which would, no doubt, look immense in any but its situation, for there nothing short of a Niagara would accord, in dimensions, with all that is within view; in fact, the only grumble we heard on the voyage was that, because there was no Niagara, Milford Sound was incomplete. While the practical section of the party betook themselves to one destination, a few of us first took a look at the waterfall. Landing at a spot where a magnificent birch-tree stands upon the beach and scrambling through a patch of shrubbery, we reached the grass plot in front of the fall, and which is known as Cemetery Point—not, apparently, because any one is buried there, but because the rank grass is so strangely marked by its various colouring, as to assume all the appearance of covering a series of graves. The stream leaps from a