FROM CLIFTON.

Press, Volume LXIII, Issue 19140, 25 October 1927, Page 6

FROM CLIFTON.

The Grandest View of All. The grandest view of all about these Port Hills is where Clifton swells quickly up into grassy slopes above Sumner Bay. Here, hundreds of feet above the sea, the eye ranges over a satisfying expanse of land and ocean. Due north, the snowtopped mountains that the Maori well and poetically named Pari-Tea—"The cliffs of glittering white," nearer the broad silver band of the Waimakariri, glacier-born river, ribboning across the plain . . '. Due north, too, are the hills beyond which Hanmer and its hot springs lie. Sweeping round towards the north-east in a grand sickled stretch of glittering sand and snowy surf goes the shore of Pegasus Bay, with the New Brighton pier pencilled in the middle distance ... Over the great bight, north by east a hundred miles away, gleaming with pale fire, a mountain heliograph, the tented ice-peaks of Whakaari and Tapuaenuku,' the giants of the Kaikoura range, lifting 9000 feet into the glowing sky. Fine Alp names these! "Uplifted High" and "Footsteps of the Rainbow." To the right front the sea, the dancing blue Pacific, with here and there, perhaps, the trail of smoke of a coastwise steamer. Right below, the mouth of the Heathcote estuary and the signal staff on Tuawera Rock keeping ward over the ocean bar where the surf beats white. JAMES COWAN.