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:—