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Chapter XX.
THE OTIRA GORGE AND PORTER’S PASS.
“And forth there stretched a silent land—
For distance robbed mine ear of sound—
League after league from the near strand
To giant peaks that, band by band,
Marched past the vision’s outmost bound.”
We had the coach all to ourselves from Kumara to Otira. It left the hotel a little after nine on a glorious morning, and very soon we congratulated ourselves upon our choice of routes, for the drive was extremely pretty. There were a great many of the “feather” ferns in the bush along this road, and of the oddly flat “umbrella” kind too, as well as the universal tree-fern and the autumn-tinted every-day ones with their companion mosses. And the blackberry and sweet-briar brambles, so cordially hated by the farmers that they include them in the black list of “noxious weeds,” but so charming in appearance, grew everywhere, with a pretty shrub called fuchsia. The road winds a good deal, sometimes leaving the bush for the cliff on the edge of the river, but the prettiest part of it is that called Jackson’s, (where there is an hotel and a small store), for the trees are bigger there, and the bush more open.
We had to cross the railway now and then, and the horses, as yet strange to the innovation, did not like the rails at all. There are no gates to the crossings out here; instead there is always a board erected on either side of the line, bearing the legend “Stop. Look out for the engine.” And at the level crossings between Jackson’s and Otira they had endeavoured to emphasize the warning by adding an exclamation point after the word Stop!, a precaution as naive as it was comical.
We lunched at a wayside cottage-inn about an hour before we arrived at Otira, and this cottage and Jackson’s were the only houses to be seen between
