If the Hochstetter has a rival of its own kind in the island, that would seem to be the Douglas glacier. This, scarcely known before 1907, was then visited and examined by Dr. Mackintosh Bell. By his account it surpasses the Hochstetter in this, that instead of confronting the stern grandeur of an Alpine valley, it looks down upon the evergreen forest and unbroken foliage of Westland. The glacier itself comes down from large, high-lying snow-fields over a mighty cliff, estimated to be 3000 feet in height. The upper half of the wall is clothed with rugged ice; but the lower rock-face is too steep for this, and its perpendicular front is bare. Beneath it the glacier continues. Waterfall succeeds waterfall: thirty-five in all stream down from the ice above to the ice below. Mingled with the sound of their downpouring the explorers heard the crashing of the avalanches. Every few minutes one of these slid or shot into the depths. Roar followed roar like cannon fired in slow succession, so that the noise echoing among the mountains drowned the voices of the wondering beholders.
Oddly enough the lakes of the South Island are nearly all on the drier side of the watershed. Kanieri and Mahinapua, two well-known exceptions, are charming, but small. A third exception, Brunner, is large, but lies among wooded hills without any special pretensions to grandeur. For the rest the lakes are to the east of the dividing range, and may be regarded as the complement of the fiords to the west thereof. But their line stretches out much farther to the north, for they may be said to include Lake Roto-roa, a long, narrow, but beautiful water, folded among the mountains of Nelson. Then come Brunner and Sumner, and the series continues in fine succession southwards, ending with Lake Hau-roto near the butt-end of the island. Broadly speaking, the lake scenery improves as you go south. Wakatipu is in advance of Wanaka and Hawea, Te Anau of Wakatipu; while Manapouri, beautiful in irregularity, fairly surpasses all its fellows. The northern half of Wakatipu is, indeed, hard to beat; but the southern arm, though grand, curves among steeps too hard and treeless to please the eye altogether. In the same way Te Anau would be the finest lake in the islands were it not for the flatness of most of the eastern shore; the three long western arms are magnificent, and so is the northern part of the main water. But of Manapouri one may write without ifs and buts. Its deep, clear waters moving round a multitude of islets; its coves and cliff-points, gulf beyond gulf and cape beyond cape; the steeps that overhang it, so terrific, yet so richly clothed; the unscathed foliage sprinkled with tree-flowers,—all form as faultless a combination of lovely scenes as a wilderness can well show. From the western arm that reaches out as though to penetrate to the sea-fiords not far away beyond the mountains, to the eastern bay, whence the deep volume of the Waiau flows out, there is nothing to spoil the charm. What Lucerne is to Switzerland Manapouri is to New Zealand. Man has not helped it with historical associations and touches of foreign colour. On the other hand, man has not yet spoiled it with big hotels, blatant advertisements, and insufferable press of tourists.
MANAPOURI
In one respect—their names—our South Island lakes are more lucky than our mountains. Most of them have been allowed to keep the names given them by the Maori. When the Polynesian syllables are given fair play—which is not always the case in the white man’s mouth—they are usually liquid or dignified. Manapouri, Te Anau, Roto-roa, and Hau-roto, are fair examples. Fortunately the lakes which we have chosen to rechristen have seldom been badly treated. Coleridge, Christabel, Alabaster, Tennyson, Ellesmere, Marian, Hilda, are pleasant in sound and suggestion. Our mountains have not come off so well—in the South Island at any rate. Some have fared better than others. Mount Aspiring, Mount Pisa, the Sheerdown, the Remarkables, Mounts Aurum, Somnus, Cosmos, Fourpeaks, Hamilton, Wakefield, Darwin, Brabazon, Alexander, Rolleston, Franklin, Mitre Peak, Terror Peak, and the Pinnacle, are not names to cavil at. But I cannot think that such appellations as Cook, Hutt, Brown, Stokes, Jukes, Largs, Hopkins, Dick, Thomas, Harris, Pillans, Hankinson, Thompson, and Skelmorlies, do much to heighten scenic grandeur. However, there they are, and there, doubtless, they will remain; for we are used to them, so do not mind them. We should even, it may be, be sorry to lose them.
MITRE PEAK
The Sounds—the watery labyrinth of the south-west coast—have but one counterpart in the northern hemisphere, the fiords of Norway. Whether their number should be reckoned to be fifteen or nineteen is of no consequence. Enough that between Big Bay and Puysegur Point they indent the littoral with successive inlets winding between cliffs, straying round islets and bluffs, and penetrating deep into the heart of the Alps. They should be called fiords, for that name alone gives any suggestion of their slender length and of the towering height of the mountains that confine them. But the pioneers and sailors of three generations ago chose to dub them “The Sounds,” so The Sounds they remain. It is best to approach them from the south, beginning with Perseverance Inlet and ending with Milford Sound. For the heights round Milford are the loftiest of any, and after their sublimity the softer aspect of some of the other gulfs is apt to lose impressiveness. The vast monotony and chilly uneasiness of the ocean without heightens the contrast at the entrances. Outside the guardian headlands all is cold and uneasy. Between one inlet and another the sea beats on sheer faces of cruel granite. Instantaneous is the change when the gates are entered, and the voyager finds his vessel floating on a surface narrower than a lake and more peaceful than a river. The very throbbing of a steamer’s engines becomes gentler and reaches the ears softly like heart-beats. The arms of the mountains seem stretched to shut out tumult and distraction. Milford, for instance, is a dark-green riband of salt water compressed between cliffs less than a mile apart, and in one pass narrowing to a width of five hundred yards. Yet though the bulwarks of your ship are near firm earth, the keel is far above it. All the Sounds are deep: when Captain Cook moored the Endeavour in Dusky Sound her yards interlocked with the branches of trees. But Milford is probably the deepest of all. There the sounding-line has reached bottom at nearly thirteen hundred feet. Few swirling currents seem to disturb these quiet gulfs; and the sweep of the western gales, too, is shut out from most of the bays and reaches. The force that seems at work everywhere and always is water. Clouds and mists in a thousand changing shapes fleet above the mountain crests, are wreathed round peaks, or drift along the fronts of the towering cliffs. When they settle down the rain falls in sheets: an inch or thereabouts may be registered daily for weeks. But it does not always rain in the Sounds, and when it ceases and the sunshine streams down, the innumerable waterfalls are a spectacle indeed. At any time the number of cascades and cataracts is great: the roar of the larger and the murmur of the smaller are the chief sounds heard; they take the place of the wind that has been left outside the great enclosures. But after heavy rain—and most rains on that coast are heavy—the number of waterfalls defies computation. They seam the mountain-sides with white lines swiftly moving, embroider green precipices with silver, and churn up the calm sea-water with their plunging shock. The highest of them all, the Sutherland, is not on the sea-shore, but lies fourteen miles up a densely-wooded valley. It is so high—1904 feet—that the three cascades of its descent seem almost too slender a thread for the mighty amphitheatre behind and around them. Than the cliffs themselves nothing could well be finer. Lofty as they are, however, they are surpassed by some of the walls that hem in Milford; for these are computed to rise nearly five thousand feet. They must be a good second to those stupendous sea-faces in eastern Formosa which are said to exceed six thousand feet. Nor in volume or energy is the Sutherland at all equal to the Bowen, which falls on the sea-beach at Milford in two leaps. Its height in all is, perhaps, but six hundred feet. But the upper fall dives into a bowl of hard rock with such weight that the whole watery mass rebounds in a noble curve to plunge white and foaming to the sea’s edge.
There is no need to measure heights, calculate bulk, or compare one sight with another in a territory where beauty and grandeur are spent so freely. The glory of the Sounds is not found in this cliff or that waterfall, in the elevation of any one range or the especial grace of any curve or channel. It comes from the astonishing succession, yet variety, of grand yet beautiful prospects, of charm near at hand contrasted with the sternness of the rocky and snowy wilderness which forms the aerial boundary of the background. The exact height of cliffs and mountain-steeps matters little. What is important is that—except on the steepest of the great walls of Milford—almost every yard of their surface is beautified with a drapery of frond and foliage. Where the angle is too acute for trees to root themselves ferns and creepers cloak the faces; where even these fail green mosses save the rocks from bareness, and contrast softly with the sparkling threads of ever-present water.
