CHAPTER VIII
ABOVE THE PLAINS
“High hills that bathe themselves in rain,
And, having bathed, loom yet again,
More glorious, o’er the smiling plain.”
Anon.
In the southern corner of the North Island, westward of the Wairarapa plains, there rises a mountain mass, of considerable height and boldness of formation, known as the Tararua Range. In summer the moisture-laden trade winds from the South Pacific Ocean wrap its 5000-feet summits in grey swirling mist and rain, and in winter the keen blustering squalls from the frozen south clothe its peaks and ridges with snow. Between times, there are bright days—generally during the passing of a crest of anti-cyclone—when the upper air is gloriously fresh and clear. For this region, at the invitation of an unknown host, we set out from the Capital one fine summer’s afternoon.
Leaving the beautiful valley of the Upper Hutt behind, our train, with its engines puffing and snorting and belching forth great clouds of malodorous smoke, begins to crawl up the steep incline towards The Summit. There the Fell engines take charge, and we start to move cautiously down the steep windings of the Rimutaka Incline, with the strong steel brakes striking fire from the central rail. For many years this railway was thought to be a somewhat wonderful engineering feat. Now it is more generally regarded as an engineering blunder, and a costly one at that. Down the steep ravine and its transverse corries the north-westerly winds howl and screech, making the carriages rock on the rails. Once the train was actually blown from the metals, and there was loss of life. The spot is marked by a wooden palisading that acts as a break-wind.
Nearing the end of the narrow, deep, treeless valley, down one side of which the line winds, we get our first glimpse of the sunlit plains of the Wairarapa—a splash of yellow, with the sombre shade of the ravine for foreground frame, and, in the distance, the thin, soft greys of far-away, low-lying hills. On the right the lake, somewhat half-heartedly, reflects the light of the dying day from its murky waters. Half an hour later we are clank-clanking across the plains, in the darkness, towards our destination, pondering upon what might be the physical characteristics and mental attributes of our unknown host, who, on the strength of our being mountaineers, had sent us a cordial invitation to climb the Tararua Ranges with him.
As a general rule, it is little use indulging in speculation about the unknown. The captain, my wife, and myself all pictured our host in different ways—and we were all wrong. The name betokened a Scottish ancestry. For the rest, when we had picked him out from the slowly melting crowd on the platform, we found him well up in years, but still alert in mind and brisk in body. And for all his years he promised to lead us a merry dance over the hills, the which he did. He was waiting for us with a wagonette, driven by himself, and a dog-cart driven by one of his daughters. In these two vehicles we distributed ourselves and our luggage—the captain had lost his—and drove across the Upper Plain to a commodious farmhouse and a hospitable welcome. Our host had a great love for the mountains, inherited, no doubt, from the wild northerners who were his ancestors, and he was loud in his praises of the views and plants and flowers to be seen “above the plains.”
As our objective, Mount Holdsworth, was a hill of only some five thousand feet, we did not expect real climbing. But your true mountaineer does not measure mountains altogether by altitude. Neither does he regard them with that “smug insensibility to mountain beauty that marked Johnson and his Boswell,” as has been pointed out by Professor Ramsay in quoting that paragraph about the Highland hills, in which, as the Professor says, the æsthetical side of the learned doctor’s soul is laid bare:—
“They exhibit little variety, being wholly covered with dark heath, and even that seems to be checked in its growth. What is not heath is nakedness, a little diversified by now and then a stream rushing down the steep. An eye accustomed to flowery pastures and waving harvests is astonished and repelled by this wide extent of hopeless sterility. The appearance is that of matter incapable of form or usefulness, dismissed by Nature from her care, and disinherited of her favours, left in its original elemental state, or quickened only with one sullen power of useless vegetation.” This, as Professor Ramsay adds, presents an exact parallel to the sentiment of a West Highland sea captain who could understand people admiring the beauty of Greenock or Gourock, with their trim villas and straight paths, but could see naught to admire on Loch Fyne—where there was nothing but “rocks and woods, and the like o’ that.” Therefore let us thank God that we are not like Dr. Johnson, or even the West Highland sea captain, and that we can see “form” and even beauty in the hills; indeed, as Douglas Freshfield has well said, that “nothing that is mountainous is alien to us; that we are addicted to all high places, wherever man has not forked out Nature.” Holding these sentiments, need I apologize to the reader for introducing him to this mountain range on whose summits one may commune with Nature, but seek in vain for hazardous adventure? The reader will decide the question according to his own tastes and inclinations.
That night it was decided that our host, his son, and his eldest daughter should accompany us on the climb, and, early in the morning, we expected a minister of the church to join us. With the captain, my wife, and myself we were, thus, a large party. We intended to retire early to rest, but supper and conversation kept us late. At last, we said good-night, the luggageless captain disappearing with a Brobdignagian sleeping-suit left over, unsold, from some church bazaar, and brought to light only upon such occasions to clothe the fair form of some Adonis-like, pyjamaless visitor.
Every preparation had been made for an early start—and, of course, we all slept in. It seemed as if I had only been asleep half an hour when I heard the parson whistling a tune to the clatter of his horse’s hoofs as he cantered up the road. I threw open my window and gave him early greeting. He had the most certain and insistent of all alarm clocks in his house—a three-month-old baby—and he was the only one of the party “on time”! The dawn was just breaking above the distant hills—and the dawns and the sunrises of these plains produce pageantries that, once seen, will be remembered. Our plan was to drive across the plain, ford the Waingawa River, and go some little distance up the Maungaterera tributary. At the last farmhouse we cried a halt, and, from this point, for the remaining seven miles, which is mostly over steep ascents, we had to depend upon shanks’ pony. The Maungaterera with its crystal-clear water drains the eastern slopes of Mount Holdsworth, and as it races over its rocky bed, through the heart of the forest, it is a beautiful stream, its petulant murmuring blending with the rustling of the beech-tree leaves so that both together form a fitting accompaniment to the plaintive notes of the birds in these solitary glades.
Leaving this stream behind, we plodded along a well-marked path, fringed with beautiful ferns, between the tall forest trees. The grade, easy at first, soon became steep, so that the cool shade was welcome. The forest that clothes the lower slopes of our great mountain ranges is frequently of beech trees, erroneously called by the settlers birch. On the slopes of the Tararuas, the magnificent, straight trunks of these stately trees, their spreading branches, and their beautiful tracery of foliage that more than half hides the blue above are a constant source of wonder and delight. One is reminded of the forest between Milford Sound and Te Anau, or of that on the sides of Mount Earnslaw, Lake Wakatipu. There is not much undergrowth in a beech forest, and, often, scarcely any sign or sound of bird life. On Earnslaw, for instance, one hears little but the rustle of the leaves in the wind. On a still day at an altitude of a few thousand feet the woods seem as silent as the grave. But in the North Island, at a similar altitude, there is more variety of vegetation and more life. Beetles and butterflies are more plentiful, and birds, though not many, are in sufficient number and variety to add interest to our journeyings. The coo of the wood-pigeon and the low whoo! whoo! of its wings cleaving the still air make music among the whispering beeches as we follow the winding path to the first steep brae. A Red Admiral (Vanessa gonerilla) rises from beside a brooklet, his wings of black and gold and red flashing in the sunlight, as, with erratic flight, he hurries away, fearing disaster and seeking the shade rather than the sunshine. Down beside that brooklet he has been reared from the larva stage on the New Zealand nettle, where, in the early hours of his life’s history, he folds himself a little tent of leaves wherein he can grow, secure from all his enemies. At a later stage, when he is thinking of emerging in all his gloriousness of gay colour as a full-fledged butterfly, he spins a little patch of silk from which he hangs on the under side of a leaf. Then, before one brief day is over, he has burst his skin and wriggled out of it as a dark or brown-coloured pupa with spots of gold or silver—a premonition of the coming glory that delights the eye, alike of the naturalist and of the casual woodland rover.
After we have climbed a thousand feet or so the giant beeches give place to more stunted trees and scrub, and, presently, we emerge upon an eminence from whence we look out across the plains, toward which the rivers run in silver threads. Thence the pathway wanders through an upland swamp before taking a downward plunge once more into the forest primeval. At the foot of this declivity, close to a spring, is the camping-place from which the final ascent is usually made. A Government hut has since been built in place of the two tents that now sheltered the wearied bodies of would-be mountaineers. We found a billy of water simmering on a dying fire, left by one of the track-makers, and soon we were drinking most delicious bushman’s tea with our “second breakfast.”
The cooing of the pigeons, the harsh throaty cry of the kaka, and the note of the now rarely seen parakeet were among the sounds that fell upon our ears in our woodland breakfast-hall. The plaintive, sibilant whistle of the long-tailed cuckoo—the kohoperoa of the Maori and the Eudynamys Taitensis of the ornithologist—penetrated the forest from the thick bushes on our left. He is a shy bird, and when you stalk for a sight of him—often unsuccessfully—you come to the conclusion that he is a ventriloquist, for one moment his “Seek! Seek!” comes loud and clear as if he were just behind that bare stump a dozen yards away, while in the next minute it will be sounding faint and low, and thus giving you the impression that he has flown afar. And all the time our long-tailed, brown visitor has not shifted from his perch, but has simply been fooling you with a modulation of his voice. Both the long-tailed cuckoo and the shining cuckoo come to New Zealand every year in the summer from the Pacific islands of higher latitudes, and, late in autumn, they go back to those warmer climes. Meantime, Mistress Kohoperoa has made the little grey warbler do duty as foster-mother, and she takes her young back with her to the islands of the coral seas, thus adding insult to injury, for she has previously eaten the eggs or even the young found in the pretty pensile nest of the warbler. In 1898 Sir Walter Buller secured two specimens of the cuckoo, both of which were gorged with young birds; and thirty-six years ago he found in the stomach of one of them a small fledgling robbed from another nest. Once again he surprised a cuckoo carrying off in his beak a tui’s egg. I am afraid, therefore, that we cannot give our distinguished visitor a certificate for fine feeling, gentlemanly instincts, or epicurean delicacy.
Mount Darwin.
Near the upper camp, where we have been eating our “second breakfast,” and listening to these birds, the forest has, at one time, been swept by a great fire, and the scar left is only now being slowly healed. From the camp we begin the final steep ascent. As we climb, the trees grow more gnarled and stunted. Many of them, festooned with long, pendent mosses, seem to have the ghostly pallor of death already about them; others are mere bleached skeletons, rearing their gaunt trunks and leafless arms above the living foliage.
We emerged from this stunted forest on to a narrow, rocky ridge, and beheld above and around us a wonderful variety of sub-Alpine vegetation. The beautiful yellow ranunculus (insignis) grew in profusion, dotting the sub-Alpine carpet with shining gold. Celmesias were here in some variety, and that strange product of the New Zealand hill, the Raoulia, or vegetable sheep, a connecting link between the Alpine vegetation of the North and South Islands, was to be found over a wide area. Here also we came upon quantities of the fragrant and quaint-looking Raoulia rubra, with its imbricating leaves and tiny, dark crimson flowers, forming dense hemispherical patches on the ground. But finer than all these, and most surprising to me, was the wonderful profusion of edelweiss, in full flower, that starred the mountain-side. In all our travels in the Southern Alps we had never seen such a sight—in itself sufficient to repay us for the toil of the climb. It was evident that it was a different species from Gnaphalium grandiceps of the Southern Alps, and, on subsequently comparing it, on my return, with grandiceps and with the Swiss edelweiss (Leontopodium alpinum), I found it was much more closely allied to the latter, but with flower heads of different structure. It was, formerly, the Gnaphalium colensoi of Hooker, but is now, I believe, classed as Helichrysum leontopodium.
One could continue to expatiate at some length on this botanical paradise, but we must hurry on to the mountain-top. The final bit of the climb is easy, and we are soon enjoying a magnificent and extensive view from the summit. Looking from below, one regards the range as narrow, but on the summit one is undeceived, for the eye wanders over a broad expanse of rolling hilltop and deep ravine, with scarred corrie and forest-clad slope leading down to the depths, and here and there silver bands of river flowing gracefully plainwards. Southwards the forests on Alpha and Omega and the lesser heights loom dark and mysterious. Northward the Mitre lifts himself above the bush line, and cleaves the clouds with his sharper 5000-feet peak. Farther on, still, the range slopes towards Mount Dundas (4944 feet), and practically ends with Ngapukaturua (3580 feet), the last mountain in the range worthy of a name on our map. More to the west, through a gap in the chain, on a fine day, is the sea, grey and mysterious in the haze of distance, but now hidden by the swirling clouds that come down on the wings of the north-west wind, gathering up moisture as they go, only to be torn asunder and robbed of their rain on these serried mountain peaks. Herein, together with the hot summer suns of the higher latitude, lies the secret of this belt of glorious sub-Alpine vegetation, the fringes of which only, as yet, have been touched by the botanist and the entomologist.
And yonder, below us, far down, is the plain, stretched like a map at our feet. One conjures up visions of it in the long ago, when, perchance, the ice-streams and rivers of a post-Pliocene period were bringing down the gravels and clays of which it is composed. And, if we go back to original causes, it is not to Governments, nor to stupid Parliaments with their fetish of new-fangled legislation, but to the mills of those old gods, which grind exceeding small, that we must attribute the prosperity of the farmer on the plain below. One can almost hear this vast expanse of level land crying, from out the mists of antiquity:—
“I am the plain: barren since time began,
Yet do I dream of motherhood, when man
One day at last shall look upon my charms,
And give me towns, like children, for my arms.”
And, sitting up here on the hilltop, amidst driving mists and gleams of fitful sunshine, one pursues this train of thought down the centuries, past the time of the moa and the Maori, and the advent of the pakeha, and the fortified pa and the old stockade. The red blood of tribal war has dyed the soil below, and those mounds, which we ourselves have seen upon the level plain, were dug from mother-earth to make ovens in which the flesh of the slain was cooked for human food. Now all was peace.
“We travelled in the print of olden wars, yet all the land was green,
And love we found, and peace, where fire and war had been:
They pass and smile, the children of the sword—no more the sword they wield—
And O how deep the corn along the battlefield!”
It was a quick transition from the spear to the plough. First the pioneer, squatting on his unbounded run; next, the road and the railway; and then more settlers; and more settlers still; but never enough settlers; for this fair land shall hold many millions where now it holds one. But these musings on the plain below and its past are disturbed by a chance remark from our genial host, with frosted head, sitting beside his fair daughter on the hilltop. Thirty years ago he climbed these mountains, and he knows the history of the plain as only the pioneer knows it. He is the typical “Colonist in his Garden,” in that delightful poem of William Pember Reeves’:—
“See, I have poured o’er plain and hill
Gold, open-handed, wealth that will
Win children’s children’s smiles,
—Autumnal glories, glowing leaves,
And aureate flowers and warmth of sheaves,
’Mid weary pastoral miles.
Yonder my poplars, burning gold,
Flare in tall rows of torches bold,
Spire beyond kindling spire:
Then, raining gold round silver stem,
Soft birches gleam. Outflanking them,
My oaks take ruddier fire.
And with my flowers about her spread
(None brighter than her shining head),
The lady of my close,
My daughter, walks in girlhood fair.
Friend, could I rear in England’s air
A sweeter English rose?”