It is perhaps half a mile across the main gully and we fix a course for the Summit track on the ridge northwards and strike down through the bush. Here in the shadowy depths there is some bird life; the trill of the riroriro , the little grey warbler, is almost constant, and an occasional fantail flits about us; but the thrush is more numerous than any native bird. When the bush bird-foods are ripe the tui sometimes pays this valley a visit from larger woodland tracks. There is a curious wildness in the valley bottom under the thicknesses of the broadleaf and the mahoe and kotukutuku ; it is half-dark in the deepest part, and great rocks lie hurled about, fire-born and water-worn. The floods that sometimes tear down have worn pot-holes here and there, and there are shallow caves obscured by tangles of roots and
Whaka-raupo, Lyttelton Harbour from Kennedy’s Bush
coiling stems. There is a venerable kotukutuku , a wizard of a tree, its whitened bark hanging in strips like shaggy bits of beard, its trunk all knotted and twisted, standing sentry at the entrance to a little dusky cavern; its misshapen branches, storm-battered, go searching around the broken top of the black and grey rock. Other of the trees take goblin-like shapes, and stretch out their bare roots and feelers, unsoftened by carpet of moss or ferns, to trip the intruder into their dim solitudes. It is but a little bit of a wood, this bush in the gully, but its aloofness and solitariness are made complete by the close-growing habit of the small timber and the great tossed-about rocks that help to seclude it. Totara of some size, we observe, once grew here; there is the tall, smooth barrel of a tree now dead. In the next main gully to the northward, the Taungahara bush, on the Native reserve, there is at least one fine totara , and some big fellows were cut down there not so very long ago by the Rapaki people for fencing posts.
As we make upwards, with care evading the diabolical ongaonga that haunts the bush outskirts, we strike a steep face, with here and there a dripping of water glistening on the moss-crusted rock and on the little flax and koromiko plants that root themselves in tiny crevices. To gain the graded and formed track again, we swarm up the fifty-foot cliff, with koromiko and aka and flax for hand-grips. Above there is a jungle of koromiko , a veronica which here assumes sub-alpine habit, and weaves a wire entanglement, fortunately minus the barbs—the tataramoa or bush-lawyer in the thicket below supplies those in plenty. The butte here is topped by a rock formation so regular and resembling a ruined fortification that the Boy Scout opines it would be a splendid place for a fight, and certainly the old shattered tor of the fire-kings, with its copses of wire-branched koromiko and its thick flax-clumps, suggests itself as a first-rate natural redoubt, where a few riflemen might hold out among their rocks and shrubby cover against a score of times their number.
The little bush on either hand here runs almost to the ridge top, and we come suddenly out of the koromiko thicket on to the great cave-worn ramparts and have a clear track to the Summit Road again. The picture from the breezy ridge is worth the warm scramble up through the matted bit of woodland. The long smooth rolls of hills go down to the Plains on the one hand; on the other the harbour and beyond the cloud-belted heights of the Peninsula. A misty shower is sweeping over the far indigo hills, and a rainbow shines out, grandly spanning a sector of the Peninsula, from the back of Purau to the ocean. And as we turn southward the thought comes, observing the evenly symmetrical round-sweep of the Sugarloaf summit from here, that the Maoris of old-time, who, like the ancient Incas saw in the rainbow the personification of a deity, may very well have caught from the peak’s likeness to the iris arch the poetic fancy that induced them to name it Te Heru-o-Kahukura, “The Comb (or crest) of the Rainbow God.”
By way of the easy return trail, we work back southward under the upper cliffs. Out near the Pass the crannied walls of old Kahukura echo to the voices of a party of girls, a botany class from the city. The instructor is improving the half-holiday with a practical talk on the native flora, and twenty notebooks are out and pencils busy.
“This,” announces the mentor as the class clusters round, “is a very peculiar plant, Urtica ferox, so called because——”
“Wow!” interrupts one of the earnest learners, as she stoops to rub a plump ankle.“It stings like billy-oh!” She has made the acquaintance of the truculent ongaonga .