Page:Through South Westland.djvu/122

58 shines through their fresh green, they seem almost transparent, and now and again one finds a lobe of golden-brown or coppery-red. As one gazed into dim green recesses, so shadowy and cool there seemed always something new to catch the eye. One was never satiated.

Where else does one see ferns growing in stories like a pagoda—whole colonies of them, two or three feet high? The settlers call it the umbrella fern; and perhaps a little farther on grow huge clumps of the Prince-of-Wales’ Feather, its tips bent exactly like an ostrich plume. Other ferns, so fine they are like a skeleton leaf or dainty lace, grow in the bush—Davallia, and many another whose name I never knew—and over them everywhere drooped the tree-ferns, straight shafts thirty or forty feet high, crowned with curving fronds, often twenty feet long. Ceathea dealbata grows even to a height of fifty feet with broader fronds not so long. Their under-side is silvery, and it is said when the Maoris planned a night attack, they would lay a pathway of these ferns in the bush, to guide them to the enemy’s pah—certain it is, at night a broken frond on one’s track is easily visible. Dicksonia, slenderer than these last, and with longer fronds, grew in groups, all in their first freshness of summer—the central fronds still curved inwards like a coronet of huge, brown caterpillars. But what use to try to write of the wealth of fern-life in the forest? It is