with crags, these great green heaps lie tossed in every direction, as though some earthquake had upheaved them. There is not much “as though” about it, either. Quiet though this land now lies, it was once smokingly upspued from a volcano; green to-day, it was once red-hot. What is more, they say that, after the fire, the sea down yonder took it in charge, and soaked it deep in brine, before the way of the world brought it back into the sun.
Yes, these strong, unchangeable hills have had their changes—almost, one might say, their trials. I always find that very difficult to realise, though, for there seems always something primeval, something elemental about the hills, as though, just as they are now, so they were in the childhood of the world, as though, too, they had kept something of its childishness. For all their greatness, is there not a certain sense of play about them—Titanic child’s-play? Look, for example, at yonder gully-side—see the pictures forming and flying along it. The wind is their painter, the sun and the clouds are his palette, and with brushfuls of shadow and shine he is creating a moving pageant as heterogeneous as the contents of a child’s fancy. Yonder goes a sheep without a tail, followed by a map of the North Island flying along as if it were a bird that Maui hauled up on his hook, instead of a fish . . . now, there goes Maui himself, striding after it, and changing his shape as he goes; with a big bottle pursuing him, and, after the bottle, a queer, lopsided house. Look, too, up at the Pass yonder, where the clouds are massing themselves into domes and ravines—making believe to be their mothers the mountains, isn’t it so? just
