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—