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“An entire hill-side had been sluiced away.”
Chapter XIX.
LAKE KANIERI AND KUMARA.
“Away into a strange glad world I pass—
A world of dreams—
Where tender blooms perfume the waving grass,
And all the streams
Make music as they flow to meet the sea—
A music passing sweet, and all of thee.”
Wednesday dawned another perfect day, and directly after breakfast we set off in a dog-cart with a fat cob driven by an old identity, one of the hundreds who congregate in and around that once busy, bustling town. The drive to Lake Kanieri was through the loveliest bush of any we had yet seen, the tree-fern seemed taller and bigger, the other kinds more plentiful and in greater variety. There were tall banks, twenty to thirty feet high, one mass of fern in all the greens conceivable, mingled with the reds and yellows of the young shoots. And deep in the bush there were real glades among the birches, but the thick mosses and entwining creepers would probably have made walking in them a difficult matter.
A great deal of gold-working used to go on here at one time, but there seems to be very little of it now. We passed a ghostly valley where the trees were all standing, grim and gaunt, just as they had died when the water needed for the gold-sluicing had been drained away from their roots, leaving them to perish of thirst. In another place an entire hill-side had been sluiced away, leaving
