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IX
THE MOUNTAIN TRACK
The mountain track, as I love to call it, though probably its extremest altitude does not attain a poor two thousand feet, starts with decision. Stony as a river-bed, steep almost as a house-roof, up, straight up, it thrusts itself between two farms with their plantations, and at a height of scarce three hundred feet above the coach-road, forces us to pant, to pause, and instinctively to turn and look below. It is the first of its many favours; for what a view is here!
Immediately at our feet, some ngaio bushes expand their stars of foliage, and stripe with crooked shadows the sunny steep brown of the path; beneath them again, the tips of the blue gums, soaring high above our heads just now, glitter like a sea of silver; farther down yet, all golden-green with sun and summer, a shoulder of lush pasture juts out—pine-trees, doubled by their own shadow, fringing it with a soft blackness very enriching
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