Page:Through South Westland.djvu/232

140 sky, making the hillside a furnace. It was very slow work, but we got to the bottom without mishap, just where there had been a settler’s homestead. It was deserted, fallen to ruin; but there were gooseberries in the garden, and we added a supply to our lunch, and we ate it under some poplars, which gave a scanty shade. The lunch was scanty too. We had only some chocolate and the gooseberries (in an old bucket), and we sat with the bucket between us and enjoyed a refreshing, if frugal, meal!

And now came the final stage of the journey, Down to the purple-blue Clutha, across it in a stage-ferry, up the rise beyond on to a table-land with mountains nearly all round it, and some forty miles off, the Aspiring Range—the goal of our ambitions. There were the snow-fields and the high black peaks between the glaciers; clouds drifted round them, now hiding them, then rolling off till they stood out clear against the blue.

The plain around us was strangely brown and bare; a few sheep scattered over it, and the great brown hawks sailing overhead, the only signs of life. We had got into a world of rocky crags and jagged mountains, and the golden tussock was left behind. It was good-going on the road inches deep in brown dust, and we cantered fast, and passed several small settlements among their poplars and willows, and then came on a white, sandy road which led us through green and shady clumps of trees into the little town of Pembroke.