En route to Te Anau's head there is only one regular port of call, a large sheep station where our steamer stopped to transfer mail and freight to a gasoline schooner. Thereafter the scenery was rugged. There were long vistas between canyon-like walls; unbroken expanses of beech forests, hung with beard-like lichens that at a distance looked like white flowers, stretched as far as the eye could see to the crags, cliffs, and peaks of the snow-line; and water-falls, half hidden by trees, plunged from lofty heights. On the east were the perpendicular precipices of Eglinton, on the west the white bluffs of Tower Mountain and the tilted, slab-like Mount Kane.
The upper part of the lake was itself like a fiord. Nowhere was it more than about a mile and a half or two miles wide, excepting at its head, where, on the west, it widened into Worsley Arm and, on the east, curved to meet the Clinton River. Here peaks rose from five thousand to six thousand feet high, mighty uplifts of granite torn, grooved, and mitred by glaciers that melted into torrents thousands of years ago.
In the midst of these we reached Te Anau's head.
"Now just look up Clinton Canyon," said the captain of our steamer proudly, as we headed for the wharf.
It was a scene that enraptured. Straight ahead, flanking Clinton Canyon on the right, loomed Mackenzie, a great bump of a mountain sprinkled with ice and snow. On its right were the bold outlines of Te Anau's frigid heights, and near at hand were Skelmorlie and Largs
