Page:Through South Westland.djvu/228

138 camp; holes and heaps of stones marked it as a gold-seeker’s abode, only a sod chimney and a pole with a tattered remnant of tent remained—all life had long ago departed elsewhere. Sometimes the track was lost, and reappeared again like a scratch across the hills—down, down we went, then halted; this was too bad for horses, and we returned, but seek as we would no other road was there, and we once more went down the gully. This time we got some distance further, and then into a narrow defile where the rock walls shut us in, and the track was choked with scrub and thorns. Through this we forced our way round an elbow in the gully, and saw a slight track rising over the shoulder of a shaley hill. We literally dragged ourselves and the horses up, and after a weary climb reached a summit, only to find it fell away in barren rocks to another nightmare of a gully, and behind us the one we had left appeared to become absolutely impassable. We turned up a spur to the left, and here we had to drag the horses up bare rock, the wise beasts coming along and making no fuss, and at last we came to a place where no four-footed beast with shoes might go, where, indeed, only a mountaineer could have climbed down. There was nothing for it but a return to the horrid gully, and from the height whereon we stood it seemed almost unattainable. My one wish was to get away from these dreadful hills and to get back to the inn, for it was eight o’clock, and we were not half-way over.