DOMINION'S CHARMS

King Country Chronicle, Volume XXVI, Issue 3445, 19 March 1932, Page 5

DOMINION'S CHARMS

ZANE GREY FASCINATED.

NATURE'S RICH BOUNTY

New Zealand is described by Mr. Zane Grey as the "Land of the Long, Bright Afternoon." Of all countries I have visited, he says, New Zealand charms me most. It is difficult to define this fascination. Islands have always intrigued me. One of my forbears must have been a meandering seafarer like Crusoe. I love New Zealand's wild, ragged coastline, where the greenwhite combers thunder on the ironribbed rocks. I love the great whtiewinged albatross, that ill-omened bird of the Ancient Mariner, with his wheeling sail to and fro, so significant of lonely seas and endless endurance. The hold New Zealand has on me, therefore, depends upon nature and beauty. I leave it to other writers to extol her fine cities and quaint resorts, her colourful Maori villages and thermal regions, her wonderful alpine fiords and glaciers. I have been four times to this strange land, and each time the haunting spell grows. It is not an enchantment of the tropics. You pass through thousands of miles of South Sea Islands, with their gold-green shore-lines, their smoking coral reefs and violet lagoons, their glorious days of sun, and grand moonlight nights, on the long voyage to New Zealand. But New Zealand is different, and that is what I am labouring to give some hint of. Summer time there seems always one long, bright, slowly waning afternoon. The days are warm, pleasant, but you do not idle as in the drowsy, languorous tropics. There is a zest in the air. You .go out to see, to seek, to find. Nowhere on earth such marvellous trees as the purple-barked kauri, the scarlet blossomed pohutakawa, and the giant fern! The exquisitely fine texture of the forests, the winding roads of pumice stone, the shining flax-bordered lakes where the wild black swans float, the billowy clouds of smoke from the old crater of Ngauruhoe, the numberless lacy waterfalls that slide from the blue clefts of the hills, and the rushing crystal rivers, like the spirit-driven Athabasca of our north—these once seen in the intimacy of that far-away country can never be forgotten. The birds alone are worth a trip to New Zealand. These are not many in species, but they are marvellous in character and voice. The bellbird, so rare, so illusive, so strange, with its single melancholy song, that it seems a haunting disembodied spirit of the jungle! New Zealand cannot be described in brief, even if that be possible at length. American travellers will find it eventually and take it to their hearts and tell of it, and then fail of its infinite charm, the soft glamour that lured the Polynesians from their trooic isles.