Page:Through South Westland.djvu/204

118 River gorge to see the falls. Here the whole volume of the river plunges between narrow, rock walls—a glorious melée of tumbling foam and bright green water. Everything was drenched with spray, and the climb back over slippery rock through wet creepers and ferns was hard work. And then we said good-bye to these last Westland friends, and started on the final stage. That night we would go to bed in the ordinary way, in ordinary beds, having probably dined off excellent Otago mutton. I am afraid no real gratitude was in my heart for these mercies. The surveyor sleeping happily in the bush: the schoolmaster teaching those few lambs in the wilderness: my friends among the settlers’ wives. . . . all had helped to spoil me for the return to the routine of daily life.

It was much more of a climb now, though the track was at no point too steep to ride, and we followed each other in single file. A cloudless sky above, rushing water on all hands, and, except for that, the deep silence of the bush. Gradually it had lost its tropical look, and we came to bare cliffs where the mountains seemed to come down on one’s head. Coming up a narrow gorge we rounded a shoulder of cliff, and saw high up the opposite mountain, the Haast glacier—not the one of that name farther north. This one seemed to topple over a razor-back mountain, poising itself like the crest of a mighty wave some thousands of feet above us. We could not see