My curiosity at last escaped control. Schnaps, whisky, scent, mineral water, bomb-shell, or whatever you are, I must investigate, even if it cost the expenses of a funeral. I could not stand the mystery any longer, so with a one, two, three, I tumbled out of bed and picked up the bugbear. Semper paratus, it said on the top. Yes, it’s always been ready. Then on the neck were directions as to how I could break it and throw it on the fire. By jingo, it’s only a hand-grenade, and here I’ve been fooling round thinking it might be whisky. As I put the bottle down I saw a rope peeping out from beneath the dressing-table. Looking underneath, I found a new rope with knots in it fastened at one end to the wall. This was a fire-escape. When a fire occurs you shy the bottle at the conflagration, and then bolt in your robe de chambre to the window, and slide down the rope into the garden.
Mac’s room had similar furniture. If I had known of all these precautionary measures before I went to bed, I might not have slept at all. In time I got accustomed to knotted ropes and blue bottles, for I found them in almost every house where we stayed.
In some hotels I heard that from time to time they had a fire drill. They usually, so my informants said, chose a night when there was a guest with a red head staying in the house. At about 2 a.m. ‘Fire! fire!’ is shouted through the building; the guests all rise, shy the bottles at the red-headed visitor, and slide down the ropes. The ladies object to the performance, as they consider that they do not look well dangling on a rope. However, as the people wish to stick to the semper paratus motto of their bottles, the fire drill is not neglected. If the man with a red head is not killed, he receives profuse apologies for his hair having been mistaken for a conflagration. I did not see a fire drill.
We left Cambridge very early next morning. The conveyance was of the usual stagecoach type. Mac and I had inside seats, I being on the weather-side and he on the lee-side of the vehicle. By lee-side is meant the side that was usually leaning over a precipice.
Shortly after starting we dived down a steep slope at the end of the town, and crossed the Waikata River. All the country was open and brown. Here and there a lonely cabbage-tree reared its green round head. Ti-trees, which in height are anything between six inches and six feet, occurred in patches. They looked like sage-bushes, and from their twiggy character might possibly make good besoms.
Next in importance to the Ti-tree comes bracken. The Maoris eat young bracken, that is, when they can get nothing else. When Ti-trees and brackens find some useful application, New Zealand will have the means of speedily reducing her public debt. The public debt of New Zealand is per head greater than that of any other country, the population of the country being about 500,000, and the debt about £30,000,000.
Sir Julius Vogel, a New Zealand Disraeli, has much to answer for as author of the incubus.
The defence for having such a debt is that with the money they build railways and other public works, and as these pay, or are destined to yield huge profits, it is a good thing to have a debt.
The most wonderful things up the Waikata River are the terraces. When you look ahead you see the river like a long bright band surging down towards you, between high perpendicular banks. Above these banks on either side there is a strip of flat ground, perhaps fifty, perhaps two hundred yards in width, and then two more steep banks. Above these there is more flat ground, and another set of banks—each flat strip representing an old flood plain of the river. In some places five or six of these terraces could be counted, each of them being beautifully defined. They had the appearance of so many parallel roads cut in the hills on either side the river gorge.
The first sixteen miles of our road was very clayey, in fact, places were so extremely sticky and puddle-like that we were in danger of being stuck fast. In summer-time the driver said it was like a billiard-table. What we crossed was like a brick-field.