Page:Through South Westland.djvu/199

Rh others drain into the Lansborough valley. Our course was up the smaller valley to the right. Before us lay a desolate broken bit of country, and here, without Ted, inevitably we should have been lost, for one might be three or four miles from the track without knowing. He never hesitated; he and his mare pressed on, through the wild scrub and shingle flats at the junction of the rivers, across water or dry land, and we followed confidently. There was, he told us, an old track along the hills, long since spoiled by landslips, and now overgrown and impossible for horses—that must have been where the surveyor got the biddies, I thought.

As we entered the Upper Haast the sun broke through completely. Looking back, we saw the snow-fields of the Lansborough glittering against the glorious blue, with a dark mass of precipitous mountains at the junction of the valleys. No longer was the Haast a hungry, treacherous river. Here it was a lovely blue stream, widening in places to broad reaches of quiet water, where the paradise ducks swam with their almost grown-up families, uttering their plaintive cry and rising and flying short distances as we disturbed them. It is a cry in keeping with the loneliness of Nature among these untrodden hills. Before us stretched a fair green lawn—so smooth it seemed almost as if it had been cut—surrounded no longer by the western bush. Here grew the first outliers of the beech forests of the eastern slopes. The dense jungle-