OUR LITERARY CORNER.

Press, Volume XLVIII, Issue 14400, 6 July 1912, Page 9

OUR LITERARY CORNER.

ORIGINAL AND SELECTED MATTER,

NOTES ON BOOKS AND AUTHORS.

ON WAIHO AND THE FRANZ JOSEF GLACIER.

•_ • (Br B. E. Bauchan.) (sjtcuixt —bitten- for "the perss."). (All Rights Reserved.) Qoito a number of New Zealanders appear to be 6hut out for ever from the delights of their own mountain scenery by the plain hard fact that ' their only holiday-time comes in winter, when most of our Alpino resorts are, for the ordinary tourist at least, practioally inaccessible. That is why I should like very much to tell such readers of "The Press" something about a place which, at one and tho same time offers a real fortune in Alpine beauty to tho eye, and is actually rather more get-at-able in winter than it is in summer. This place is Waiho, in South Westland. Waiho —with its snow-peaks and its two great glaciers— . the Franz Josef close at hand, the Fox within, a day's ride. Waiho, with its neighbouring lake, lovely. Mapburika, , its deep enveloping forest, its hot springs, and also, to mention a fact by no means of little moment to winter Jioliday-makers, its excellent hotel. Well —and how does one get there, then? Ono coaches for two day 6, south from Hokitika —from Roes, rather. Coaches 1 For two days!! In winter 111 What can you bo thinking of? I am thinking, first of all, of an old proverb, "Forewarned is forearmed," and of resultant rugs and hot-water bags. lam thinking, next, that (niching pretty well at sea level, never \ery far "from tho boa, and mostly through' Bush, is not after all such very cold work, especially when the coach does not start so very early or got in jk> very late. And I am thinking, too, that tho coach road of Westland is excellent; that in winter the weather is commonly at its best, that the green glory of its ferns and Bush is then undiminished, the white glory of its mountains considerably increased, and the water of its rivers lower than, at any other time. Now,. may I go on ? Oh, well —of course of wo are not interested we can easily leave- off reading. . • • Yon can—true. Too true I for 1 veally should like to confide to you somo impressions of mine concerning Waiho, and beg you to compare them with your own. So hero, all in a hurry, off I will start, and lay before you tho practical .information that the railway, reaches ' Bouth'as for as Ross, and that Adameon's South Westland Royal Mail coach loaves Ross every Tuesday morning, and returns to it again every Sunday .night. Suppose we leave with it. Out from Ross we go—pleasant little Ross, with its broad street lined with trees, and its leisurely aspect, not interfered with ■at all by that side activity of goldmining—tailings to the left of us, blue, , resounding ocean to the' right, and* all tho narrow littoral of' South' Westland . Ahead; dash, through the waters of .tho Mikonui river and scon are bowling along v a fine road"through a wonderful world of Bash. How wonderful, and, ah! how beautiful it ;»] Straight .to-the .sky , '•hcot- : up,tho*tall,' i slender miro -■ myrtle-green, "whit©. pin©,'' straight as and rima the red-pine;- solemn .-;; •^"stately 1 , dripping with long" tassels ■ '"Of'bronze-green'light and black velvet : * shadow. Oh, rimu! this West Coast is 'the homo of your glory, and the place i, whore one falls in love with you. Often < the pillar-lik© trunks branch riot at all for their first twenty or thirty feet, . .and,that'gives space below for the endlessly . enlacing twigs, and the glossy leaves of a' luxuriant • but not too' tangled an undergrowth—broadleaf and

castor-oirtroe, "silver birch" and! lancewood and ruddy popper I tree—with bright' sunshine, I hope, j peeping and dancing and splashing I it.—Pray for sunshine in the ! - • "USH»' if you never' may have it anyelse. On tho borders of th© road - Nature- has taken ono of her sweet re-'

venges, and ,wher© man has cut down her full-grown trees to mak© room for , his feet,-hhe.has lined his path with a feathery'spray, a light froth of foliage, the airiest, and most delicate imaginable—child rimus, baby birches, and fuchsias and currant trees, all the springing youth of the forest. Tho graps, if indeed any .grass was ever here, seems to have lifted itself up wwily fro-n the road, and flung itself mto the arms of tho tree*, rimu for choice; every rimu is fairly hung with long streamers and ribbons of Oh, Jt is not grass, after all, but ge-gd, iiorkie, rather, to bo correct.' But the ferns have stayed by tho road, in their nul abundance—tree-ferns, ,high overhead, like stars of bright green among the.darner undergrowth; ribbon-ferns that stream from every bank; umbrella ferns stretching out their- thin fingers towards the road like expectant 'woodland starfish; ono "bracken" dark and *jj"J» awl another, tho commonest ' i '~ 5° my " m: ' R<3 ' almost the "ovehest of all these ferns, veiling tho wayside in light laoes of " nJ!! een particnlarl y glad and" sweet, weeks, often unseen, bubble and warble afongrde. Fantails cheep and flutter. Hark! Was not that a tui's call? tt ■£ ten oTer oar heads there sounds we odd creaking of some pigeon's "oarago Of wings," as he flaps hcavilv across . we, road, and settles on a bough quite «ose- to tho coach, too fat with miro berries to go far. AVhat a fino fellow no » with his full and large waistcoat '°5_Y ' his co!,nr of dancing green, *«w his coat of dulled sea-blue and «""nmed purple! .'And now wo stop for lunch at one of W» very few and solitary dwellings w© nay© so fa.- met—Urquhart's— and got , £? r «** experience of tho characteristic ! bonth Westland hosteCries. Delightful Places they are—farmhouses, homes, "J** , re thc 3" are "accommodation nouses ' ; fresh, clean, country-like. Oh, that moro pretentious up-country lodg- , mg-would take pattern by them ! Theirs are the three H's, hard work, hospitality, and heartiness, and a humanity of which I can only say that is .as attractive to the traveller as the landscape. Come how you Will, and when you will, you shall never lack any comfort of body or of mind that skillj , goodwill, and a frank friendliness can , #fford. , ,imt we must gpb an past «

lovely lake in tho afternoon, Lake lanthe, liko a Sleeping Beauty deep in Bush, and on through country where the trees often give place to 6mall blackened clearings about small cottages ; settlement is going on here, though slowly. On tho left the road is now visibly flanked by a long wall of great hills, plaided with green light and purple shadow, capped with white snow, and often we cross creeks and rivers, sometimes bridged, sometimes not, but always with a breadth of bed and a wild accumulation of debris not at all accounted for by their narrow winter waters. Ah-these rivers of Westland —the.better they are known the less are they trusted. In the late afternoon we cross the Big Wanganui, for instance—its bridge is not yet completed —that was responsible, only a few months back," for the* sad death of Mr and Miss Locke. Just beyond it lies tho growing settlement of Hari Hari. Here we disembark, to spend the,night at Adamson's; then on again next .morning, through flat land first, and then''across a most beautiful forested hill, Mount Hercules, with the road winding in and out. up and down, between banks of fern and moss, tree-roots above us, treetops below j and so to Wataroa flat and settlement, and a pleasant halt again, at "Gunn's." And now our final stage takes us past little dark Lake Waihopa, past "Tho Forks," with its flavour of old mining days—the road to Okarito branches off here —and by and by out upon Lake Mapourika, with, if wo are lucky, one" lino of great white snows upon the sky above, and another in the perfect mirror of the waters at our feet. And what is that long staircase of white, coming down through the forest yonder? We see it better presently, as, rounding a corner, we come out upon the clear space of a river flat, and have before us a great and good sight, green forest in the foreground, and the blue smoke of a picturesquely placed largo dwelling; in the background, lofty snow fields and snow peaks/flushed with the afterglow, and,, coming down' from the snows into the forest, that same great white causeway —what is it? Well, this is Waiho, yonder house is the Glacier Hotel, and that descending -whiteness is tho Franz Josef Glacier. ,

' I ought really to have begun by saying, bring your boots--with you, and let them be real boots, with soles a quarter-inch thick' at least, capable of holding nails.- For here is another proverb, 'very appropriate to glaciers;— "Sltddery ways, crave wary walking." AVith the other essential for, safety on .the, ice, a good guide, Waiho can luckily provide us (one of the very best, Alpine guides in New Zealand lives, by the j way, at. Waiho); so, now for the glacier at close quarters. Over the sus-. pension bridge across the Waiho river,' running milky-blue beneath, up- a .delightful track through ■ lovely "lesser forest," where, in one spot, we receive a sudden vision, framed in" green boughs, of that long ice-stream descend-; ing apparently from heaven;, on again, \ up the narrowing gorge, and again' across it by means of another bridge—, and how, after a: walk of some two and; j. a half. milesin all, here we are, lookingdown, through a fringe of olearia-leaves; and pale gold toi-toi wands, at the; terminal ice-face. .What is it that we actually, see?..'.' Well, it looks' like a huddle, a. confusion, of great opaque white rocks, tumbling'in a hurry round a corner; with some six or seven greater grey.-ones, sparsely covered with vegetation,; apparently damming them back, and: saying,- "No farther." ,Between some ofVthese grey rocks," on,the.ifurther side - of-tho* here about half a, milo'wide, the Waiho river is running, newly released from the ice. ■ Of moraine, that dreary dishevelment of loose stone-heaps, so difficult to discover either beauty or ? comfort; in, there {is practically , not any at* all; straight Irohi we can get on to tho ice. * And, ihdeed,,we' "shall have to do so; ■'!.s or; a, little while since the; glacier, Tvnich,^somotimes ! ' advancing, sometimes receding, is at all times.full of movement itself, ,fairly broke the track's * back in one 1 place by rising bodily up; beneath it: But we can continue our walk" either by meansxof the ; aptiial ice itself, or; by re-gainihg;tho-track, a brief experience upon'the side-ice, and following it- for another cOuple or so of miles, all along the east, or- left," "cbast" of the glacier,' at some. little height above its surface. And this I think we willld'o'''for the track is something of a wonder.j in itself. a real feat of engineering—winding in and out among the shrubs, clambering up and . down huge; boulders mosscovered, flung by means of airy, 2 but quite sound, suspension bridges, across headlong creeks, deep within precipitous ravines, and marvellously-coaxed round enormous, quite smooth rocks, by means of long plank '.'galleries'' with, handrails. And then, too, it is from the track that wo. shall" get one of the characteristic aspects of tb<v Franz. It is a picture of it sideways; Above us, as»-wo stand near, the Government hut, soy, some distance along tho track, the bushes still plentifully green (they are splendidly dashed with xata-red in the autumn, and N. 8., riext year will be rata year on *.he Coast), clamber still upwards to clothe these steep slopes of the Baird Range, below, they gradually give place to naked slopes. Of grey, ice-smoothed rock, which in; turn descend to a honeycomb of blue-and-whito ice at tho edge of the glacier below. Opposito, half a mile away, is the other great wall of the valley, the side of tho Kaiser Fritz Range, also grey andbaro at its base, also hung upon with greenery higher up, then soaring into show (as, of course, the Baird does, too, if we could only see it), exceedingly precipitous, and striped here and there by long of water falling utterly headlong—or are"tbev f•--■•■ so- that they.- cannot fall ? While the half-mile"gap between these mountainwalls is floored with—what? AVith a roadway, a river—no, no, with an absolute torrent of torn white and blue, pent between the grey and green walls, obviously surging, raging, between them, lifting itself up into great wbito sharp-lipped crests, splitting itself into deep bluo troughs, careering onwards as plainly as possible—and -yet', O wonder! all the while silent, frozen ice. The next .view we will pause over is unlike this, for it is all of peaci?. A few miles up the glacier, •*»ntl on the opposite, the right hand. Ka*ser Fritz side of it, there is a rocky' otit-jut of .the mountain-foot, called Capo• Defiance. 'To this from the end of our track let us cross over, by way of the steep and glittering surface, and having climbed to it, look down along tho glacier. Here the wild whiteness, that is now. our foreground,.seems to flow more smoothly, and it carries on and points tho,. eye to ' a lovely scene beyond, all gentleness and space, an expanded landscape of man 3* curves and colours. First comes the winding white of the ice, beyond that a belt of dark green forest; the gleaming loop 3 !of tho AVaibo River, next, nnd of the 1 Totara,' with more forest interspersed; i then the broad shining of Lake MapouriEa, again more green, and then the long bluo sea—-m-its way, could any scene be lovelier? And then again, as we turn and look up the Glacier from tho same standpoint, could any scene be of a nobler wildness? If tho ice seemed liko a torrent lower with what can wo• compare -it here? Still hemmed in between the two great -, - s ■

ranges it divides, down from its snowlields above, it comes now apparently rushing towards us in a regular tumult, a wild broad cataract and dazzle of glory, the whiteness of it all rent and nveu and set ut> on end at impossible angies j n pinnaces and peaks, the blueuess gleaming from every consequent chasm. High upon the extreme right, some of these colossal seracs stand out upon the sky, an-J 1 question whether the impression they make, of sheer cleanness, both of line and colour, anywhere else in Nature be surpassed, jjlazuuj at noon, visited with softness by light mists, ghostly grand in the gathering twilight, angel-, ical under the stars, .when is this view of the Great Icefah'of the Franz Josef at its best? I d 0 not i in<w . If wo were to climb a good way up Mt Moltke, here above our heads at the Cape (but I am not sure whether this is possible in winter), wo should command a view of the snowlields by which the glacier is-fed. Soft, smooth, almost level white, there they lie in a wide serene reposo ... with the glacier gathering itself together at their edge, and bebeginning to descend, to plunge ... and no wonder- It has about eight thousand feet to drop, in a little le*>s than eignt, miles, before it brings up at Waibo, only 69-t feet above sea-level. In Europe you would have to go right up to tho north of Norway before you would find a terminal ice-face so low.

And what about the ice itself? the surface of the Franz Josef, as distinguished from its career? Well, that is as lovely as the career is grand; pure and clean white almost everywhere, soft to the eye as new fallen snow, and everywhere shot through and vivified by a blue—- O that I had colour to use instead of words 1 But then too 1 should be in despair, for what mortal pigment could' ever reproduce the blue of a glacier? From under our feet it smiies subtly up at us, till we seem to be walking up.and down hillocks of blue glass, only lightly frosted over. Like tho fine, breath of breach, the fairest haze of hazes, it hovers within the mouth of -moulins. Here, in an ice-cave, it makes miniature skyscapes, all azure profund.ties and moonlit clouds j there, between the pinnacles of the broken ice,, it stands like solid slices of the purest possible colour. It is well .worth while, too, to put our nerves in our pocket, and get the guide to take us into one of the frequent network, of crevasses. The hard, ice flies in showers of crystals and diamonds from his. axe, as he cuts steps along the edge of some "razor-back," rising thin and sharp and White out, of an abyss of blue on either side, and, following him. one gets the impression that one is really walking along tho top of a wave in a rough sea—very rough; all around us rise a multitude of similar sharp white crests, a chaos of "breakers," all separated from each other by winding and deep blue troughs. Sometimes the way leads down into one of the shallower of these —and then we look aloft at a wild Polar landscape of white hillsides and ridges. , Whichever way ono looks one feels bewildered—perhaps even to the verge of giddiness. But tho guide will look after us, and there are experiences in life well worth a little shiveriness. We can get back to Waiho aga ; n, through more' woodland, and On the way phinge our ice-dazzled eyes deep, into the green of moss and fern and, foliage, and our well exercised bodies! into a hot bath at the little simple hot! springs bath-house. And to-morrow-you can ride over to tho Fox. Ah, the Fox, and the lovely.-lovely way to it—' but my time is up and all I can ao \s. to gasp here w'th my last lino, go, and: see it'for yourself. \