“That was written in the days when the “Tarawera” came here in place of the “Waikare” I expect,” said Colonel Deane. “In those days there was really some excuse for a lack of energy on the tourist’s part,—at all events if he came via McKinnon’s Pass! A kindly Government had not then taken the overland excursion under its wing, and there was no Tourist Department to build huts and make tracks. People were very frugally fed if they came overland, and had really a good deal of hardship, and when they arrived here there was no such thing as a telephone from Sandfly to warn old Sutherland to fetch them, nor iron ropes to help them up the rocks to the top of the Bowen Falls. In those days there was some spice of adventure attaching to an expedition over McKinnon’s Pass to Milford, but now they are fast making such a feather-bed thing of it that there will soon be no more novelty in the walk than there is to a Londoner in walking from the Marble Arch to Hyde Park Corner.”
We watched their departure next morning, and then, rejoicing in being alone again, spent nearly all the rest of the day in the launch. But we ventured farther out, even to the “open sea” that had been so great a bugbear to Mrs Greendays and me when we thought that we had to cross it in a rowing boat in the dark, and visited a little bay in which Sutherland declared he had found gold and precious stones as well as greenstone.
Christmas Day dawned fair and serene, without a cloud in the sky, and the air so still and clear that every twig and tendril in the bush seemed to be distinct. We climbed up through the tangle of bush and ferns and trees on the cliffs to the Bowen Falls, first to the top fall, and then down to the basin it falls into only to leap out into the air right away from the rocks and tumble headlong into the Sound. It was the finest sight and the grandest, finer far than the Sutherland Falls, grander even than the Huka. For the great mass of water comes rushing down the first cliff in a foaming torrent, irresistible, and awful in its power, and while an immense white body of seething froth is whirling in the rocky basin another, sea-blue and transparent, in one gigantic curving fountain shoots into the air, and falls, leaving between it and the rocks a wide space that shows a picture of the vegetation on the further cliff.
In the woodland up on those cliffs there are dozens of green and brown parrots, though we had not seen a single one all the way along the track. The climbing is by no means easy, and it is very wet under foot, for the vegetation is so dense that the ground never gets a chance of drying. And so the mosses and ferns are simply lovely.
Mrs Greendays said after luncheon that she must rest in preparation for the walk back, so she went out in the fishing boat with her husband, who had been fishing since early daylight. But Colonel Deane and I wanted neither to fish nor to rest, so we went off for a walk through the wood at the back of Sutherland’s into the Cleddan Valley, under the Pembroke Peak.
And as we walked he told me many things, but none that interested me more than the story of his poet, David the Dreamer as he called him. But it is too
