Page:Our New Zealand Cousins.djvu/206

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190
Our New Zealand Cousins.

plunge upward, from the still blue depths of the abyss. They look in their regularity of outline just like so many great fish, and I do not think the simile at all a strained one.

On the Glenorchy side are some very perfect examples of the terrace formation, which is one of the most extraordinary of the geological phenomena which abound on all hands. The top terrace is named the Bible. It has a breadth of eighty or ninety acres, and is as flat as a book, though why it gets the name I could not find out. There is no doubt that each terrace was successively the lake level, and as the waters sank, owing to the cutting away of the rim at the Kawarau Gorge, these steps of this giant's staircase were left in their present regularity. Now, of course, great gaps and chasms are being torn through them by the incoming waters, and another terrace is forming at the present level of the lake. The waters will again recede, and fresh terraces be formed, until in time a valley will be left with the conjoined waters of the Rees and Dart foaming through it, in a deep gorge, just as the Kawarau now tears down through its rocky channel.

The crowning feature of the whole view is, of course, Mount Earnslaw. He rises from the flat of two abrupt ridges, enclosing a vast glacier between. The ridges gradually draw together, and at the point of convergence a majestic mass shoots up into the heavens, like a pyramid of glory, and the great, glistening, white expanse is Mount Earnslaw.