LONELY BEAUTY OF WAITOMO'S FAMOUS CAVES

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXVI, Issue 23411, 29 July 1939, Page 1 (Supplement)

LONELY BEAUTY OF WAITOMO'S FAMOUS CAVES

By GRAMMATICUS

'J' HE RE is a fascination about holes in the ground. Witness the crowd, eyes mutely downcast in Jean Batten Place, while the shovels dig down to the ancient harbour mud. Holes in the ground, and the rough kiss of blankets; these are two of Rupert Brooke's long list of ; things he loved. That, however, was not why I went back to Waitomo. I wanted to recapture a. moment. It was in January thirteen years ago. The sun was dropping at the end of the bush-choked valley when we entered the Glow-worm Cave. As the boat came to the entrance of the underground stream,' it was the blue twilight. ... Behind was the dark mystery of the cave with distant water, dripping, dripping. Ahead the soft half light came through a delicate grey-green curtain of fern fronds and maiden-hair. Under it the dark water turned silver. It is one of those pictures which will remain a possession • for ever. Fern Curtain at Door What are the others? There is the day in August when wo emerged, from the soaking bush round Okareka and found the mist of the morning's rain still dropping white streamers into the trees that crown tho Blue Lake. The twin meres were still as death, perfect mirrors of tho white mist and the solemn bush. There is tho clear frosty day in Juno when I first saw Egmont, a white spear point across tho sweep of the Taranaki Bight. There is the smiling English beauty of the Mataura Valley seen from the hard-won top of the Hokonuis in tho shimmering heat of a Southland summer day. But to return to the fern curtain at Waitomo's front door. It was hero that surveyor Mace, who found the cava, entered. For how many centuries tli? glow-worm fishermen had been studding tho dark roof with their points of chemical light, the stalactites alone can toll. A strange livelihood, theirs. Insects straying in the cave rise to their false light and stick.to the hanging threads. The glow-worm nips tho lucky line and draws in his catch It seems only yesterday that electric light, and guides, disturbed the absorbing task of the only active life the limestono darkness has ever known. Records of Ancient Life In tho .Bluo Mountains behind Jcnolnn there aro caves where the rabbits swarm in time of drought. George Digby's theory is that the envo fungi enable them to defeat the dry weather. He found them in tens of thousands, green eyes glinting horribly in the torch-light. The caves at Waitomo have never known such warm and •earthy life. Their dripping walls have never blackened to the fires of savage men. Perhaps this is their greatest lack. There are caves where strange hands nave loft a record of ancient life. Bulls and reindeer painted with a poetry and realism which show the absurdity of many of our magazine ideas on cave men, add a touch for which our humanity craves. One of the finest passages of proso poetry in Kuskin

Glow-worms- were Undisturbed for Centuries

describes a European mountain scene. It was spring time and the flowers were crowded for very love, "the clefts in the limestone were choked with them, and touched, with ivy on the .edges—ivy as light and lovely as Uie.vrne." Their, glory was legion, from the blue gush, here and there, of violets to "the golden softness of deep, warm, ambercoloured moss." " It would be difficult," says Ruskin, "to conceive a scene less dependent upon any. other interest than that, of its own secluded and serious beauty." But he imagines the whole landscape transferred to some aboriginal forest of South America. A chill descends on its beauty. 'The shadows of the mountains, when tliey no longer fall over the wall of Joux and Cranson's four-square keep, the stones that human hands have piled, become sinister and forbidding. The blue-green beauty had owed its warmth to the presence of man. Our Only Cave Drawing There.are soured souls who will not. agree with 'Ruskin. Most of us will. And so, perhaps, Waitomo's beauty is cold, because the water of long centuries has eaten out a homo for men who never came. A petrified Greek woman gathers up her robe and descends from a crystal Acropolis among tho stalactites of Aranui and Epstein figures, curiously wrought, haunt the corners. We would exchange some of them for the slash of red paint of an ancient artist. And yet how have wo treated the only such cave drawing wo possess? It is inland from Timaru where the wide stony bed of the Opalii River runs back

to the Alps. The Hanging Rock *is a rendezvous for fishermen, but it was.* not the trout in the clear snow water that interested me that day. Under the. bluff an ancient, loop of the river once carved -a. Way.. From 1 the long groove some flood with its shifting silt turned" the stream away and left a rock-roofed grandstand by the river side. Here the Maoris, or some.tribe earlier still would shelter; and here their artist painted fish in rod. Like all cave paintings they are astonishingly realistic. A shark or dogfish is caught in the very act; of a. curving dive. And till over the rock, and round the ancient drawing are carved and dan hod the names of fools.'One whose name is too ugly to quote,' has used a full pound of paint and a ladder to print himself above the dogfish. With equal tact someone else has tried a text. Rome's Catacombs What is this idiot urge? Names scrawled on the Pyramids date back to Greek mercenaries, six hundred years •before Christ, so the sin is an ancient one. But we grudge them the Hanging Rock. And yet the human touch can have its pain and path'os. Under Imperial Koine, a labyrinth of full six hundred miles are the man-made caves, cut in the soft tula, rock, which wo call the catacombs. In their dark galleries lie four million Christian dead. Dark chapels and hidden fonts tell tales of persecution. Innumerable inscriptions speak of faith and loyalty in face of death, and tell again the ancient tale of man's intolerance to -man. What if the beauty of Waitomo is a lonely beauty? The rock floors of its caves have-never padded to the swift step of fugitives, no innocent blood has stained the sand. They toll no tale ol suffering. For all their age they symbolise our youth. We liave ho history full ol shadows of dark things. And of the future? Who can toll? When Prometheus in tho legend took away man's foreknowledge of death, he sent him hope.