The passage of untold ages has so little altered these fire-made ranges that build a picture-like ring about Lyttelton Harbour that their origin and history are plainly revealed to the climber and the Summit Road stroller; the story of the rocks can scarcely be mistaken. Geologists from the days of von Haast have written much of the Lyttelton and Akaroa volcanic systems, and in truth it is an ever-new and ever-fascinating subject. There is hardly a more interesting specimen of vulcanism in New Zealand, for example, than the strange wall of grey-white lava rock which Europeans call the Giant’s Causeway and the Maoris “The Fire of Tamatea,” which protrudes from the hilltop just above Rapaki, and which may be seen again on the far side of the harbour, a volcanic dyke that the ancient people—with surely some perception of geological truth—connected in their legends with the internal fires of the North Island. Along the craggy hill faces again, and particularly well in such places as Redcliffs and the Sumner end of the range, it is easy to read the history of the rocks in the alternate strata of solid volcanic rock and the soft rubble that seems almost to glow again with the olden fires. The most wonderful example of this stratified formation is the face of the south head of Akaroa Harbour; but it is possible to study similar pages in the volcanic chapter of Canterbury’s history without going many yards from the Summit Road anywhere from the sea to the hills above the harbour head.
The most perfect local example of an ancient crater perhaps is one that does not seem to have attracted much attention from scientific writers and lecturers, and this may be mentioned as a type of the remarkable places which build up the romantic ruggedness and savageness of our harbour-palisading hills. It is to be studied especially well from the Lyttelton-Governor’s Bay road. Above Corsair Bay and Cass Bay there is a group of bold rocky peaks which, as the traveller passes onward from Lyttelton, is seen to curve inward in a huge half-cup, open to the south, and down this open side are strewn the disorderly remains of the old lava stream which flowed from the core of the volcano and which ran out into the harbour at Cass Bay in a tumbled black reef. It does not require a great effort of imagination to reconstruct that fire-cup as it must have appeared in the era when the fantastic hills were still in the making and shaping. The Maoris, with a quick eye for such significant topographical features, gave the place a name which blends history with legend, “Wheke’s Sleeping Place.” Indeed, that strange hollow in the hills might have made fit cradle for a Finn MacCoul. Like the crater-topped cones of the Tamaki Isthmus, it is softly grassed; a stray ngaio is the one remnant of the bush that once covered the volcanic detritus; but the hugely ramparted and square-hewn rim of the basin stands indomitable and unchangeable, unmistakable memorial of the active volcanic age. Such bold crags are “the eyebrows of the hills”; they give what would otherwise be tame landscapes dignity and force and wildness, and an exploration of these fastnesses of Nature so near our doors, and opened up by the Summit Road, is not merely pleasurable, but is fruitful in an intelligent appreciation of the amazing forces which helped to mould the land in which we live.
All along the fire-fused line of these Summit Peaks from the Lighthouse to the Seven Sleepers and beyond there are amazingly bold bits of rock and cliff scenery—abrupt escarpments like huge redoubt walls, bearded with mountain flax, and flakey from the attack of ages of winter frosts; straight smooth cleavages that seem almost artificial, so sharply and finely are they worked by Nature, the great sculptor; rounded buttresses like enormous pillars shoring up the mountain side; caves here and there, old bubbles in the molten lava, caves that might have sheltered some cannibal highwayman in the days of stone club and face-tattoo; strangely shapen projections of the cliff-edge, some remindful of animal forms; tomahawk faces of grey storm-beaten rhyolite dipping down into the green arms of the little woods where the tui’s rich echoing “bing-bong” and gurgling chuckle are still heard in the shady depths when the bush fruits are ripe. Here and there a little watercourse, its fountain-head waters dripping silently from some cool crevice in the rocks, all arboured over by the matted roofing of kotukutuku, twisty and witchy of branch, and mahoe and glossy-green karaka of the plenteous foliage. Watercourses that fit the bold mountain
The Seven Sleepers
C. Beken, photo
pictures about them; dry in summer, they come down in tumultuous little cataracts in time of heavy rain, plunging over the piled fragments of lava rocks, and filling for a day or two the age-worn pockets and pools and “pot-holes” in the winding valleys all arched over with the close-growing light timber. Deep down in these twisting gullies below the straight cut harbour-facing cliffs, there lingers still a certain quality of primitiveness and a suggestion of the ancient adventure; an atmosphere still in keeping with the legendry of these Hills. Here in the leaf-thatched hollows of Taungahara or the woven thickets that blanket the precipice fronts of the Seven Sleepers still shall you have intimate glimpses of wild nature. Up on the tussock-swarded mountains of the hawk and deep in the sudden valleys still may you, though so near to the City, breathe the mind-refreshing fragrance of the grand out-of-doors, hold healthy commune with
“All the still-eyed Soul that broods
In wide wind-whispering solitudes—
Each cloud chase chequering hill and plain—