WELLINGTON'S BEAUTY.

Auckland Star, Volume LX, Issue 257, 30 October 1929, Page 6

WELLINGTON'S BEAUTY.

MIST EFFECTS FROM THE HEIGHTS. Father Martindale, who wrote such pleasant things about New Zealand lately, was charmed with Wellington's Italian lake-like harbour and its circumvallations of blue ranges. His poetic soul would have delighted, had he been with us longer, with some aspects of Wellington landscape as residents know it, and most of all the dwellers on the hills. The mists on the mountains give this up-and-down city a quality of beauty that no other city in these islands can show, not even Dunedin. Just about the tail-end of the winter months, and when spring is slowly merging into early summer, Wellington has a morning glory of mingled fog and sunlight that_ gives an everchanging picture of soft colour and mist form. Only, to see that picture, you must live on the heights.

Auckland has its misty beauty of early morning. Never shall I forget the sight, out beyond Kangitoto Channel, of Admiral Sperry's American fleet in line silently emerging out of the luminous fog like spirit ships, in seemingly endless procession. How long ago was that? Twenty years or more, yet it remains in the memory when later pictures have faded. But Wellington's morning mist panorama is of quite an alpine character. Looking out, say, from Brooklyn heights, five hundred feet above the city, some quiet dawntime before the sun has swung up over the black Orongorongo Ranges, you might almost imagine yourself in the heart of the Urewera Country, or on the slopes of Ben Lomond high above Lak.± Wakatipu. If it were not for the flagstaff and the lofty radio station masts on the sharp tip of Mount Victoria, and for the dim shapes of the nearer . houses in the foreground, the illusion would be completed. The silent city in the gulch below is invisible,-drowned in a fleecy sea; so, too, is the harbour; only the higher summits lift above the level ocean of vapour, like islands rising from a softly-swirling ocean. Dwellers on the heights here are gods looking out over a world of white and smoky blue, pitying those benighted ones who are content to live on the fog-filled, smoky levels so far below.

And, though confirmed Auckland dwellers may not credit it, there is often a soft, dreamy beauty about Wellington nights that even the Waitemata's summer-time nocturnes cannot surpass. Last night when the moon rose out of the northeastern cloud banks and illumined the harbour— it was, to be exact, about two o'clock in the morning—there was thinnest haze that gave it all a kind of enchanted silvery softness, toning the light to the magic glimmer of a glowworm cave. Directly above the moon great Jupiter gleamed with scarcely winking eye. In the moonpath oil the moveless waters rode an anchored vessel, maybe one of those shapeless arks of ugliness, an oil tanker; in this pale light she might have been a ship of faery. Nearer, there was a shadowy glen below me, where fern trees grew, a dell of foliage such as you see in many of Wellington's gullies, a place where the riroriro trills these spring days. This quiet night, had it been in a mid-England wood, I fancied, one might have heard the nightingale. From reports, however, that fantasy may become a pleasant reality in New Zealand. But if you know Wellington you will know that this is too good to last. This soft, unearthly beauty—what did it portend? We had not long to wait. Long before peep of dawn moon and stars vanished in a gathering and thickening sea fog that came stealing in from Cook Strait. The fog darkened, came piling in, and up with a whoosh! came the wind. We were in for the familiar old "hau-tonga," the "tupuhi," the dear old buster from down yonder. The whale hunters of Tory Channel and Kaikoura talk of the "buttend of a sou'-wester." Here it is, howling like an Antarctic gale. Such is quick-change like in Poneke. —J.C.