RANDOM ROAMINGS

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23107, 5 February 1937, Page 14

RANDOM ROAMINGS

AN INCONSEQUENTIAL HOLIDAY IN SOUTH CANTERBURY

By E. L. S. When we foregathered in the train at the Dunedin Railway Station on a cold and unpleasant morning of January, and felt ourselves drawn away from the scene of our various labours towards climes which we hoped would be fairer than those we were leaving behind us, but which, for that day at least, proved to be even duller, we had not the remotest idea where our destination was to be. Such ignorance lent an air of piquancy to a situation vvhich otherwise would have been no different from the usual excitement of setting off on a holiday, and turned the idea that nothing can be a success, unless well-planned before hand, into a popular fallacy. We would order three weeks stores while we were in Timaru, we decided, and to begin with, make for Pleasant Point, where a friend of our school days owned a home and a motor car. But further than that we could not, and would not, go. At the Waitaki, where it became all to apparent that rain was by no means a specialty of Otago’s, but belonged to Canterbury also, we pulled our wits together, roused ourselves from the lethargies into which the rocking train had lulled us, and began a debate about stores, which allowed us by and by, to present a more or less sensible list to a large shop m Timaru and part with some of the money we had brought with us .on this vague and uncharted escapade. We also saw a man who gave us news about a hut, and made inquiries about the weather at Lake Tekapo, after which, wet enough by now to feel thoroughly reckless as to consequences, we stalked through the driving rain from one street to mother until we felt that we knew Timaru by heart and could take the train to Pleasant Point with clear consciences. In that inconsistent fashion of people who are caught by the rain in their best clothes, we were more than a little self-pitymg to begin with and prepared to be rather difficult. But the sight of our hostess at Pleasant Point, large and reassuring in brown jodhpurs and blue jersey with a car big enough to cope with all our troubles at once and a laugh to dispel every bogey, made us forget our discomfort and become excited instead. Half an hour later we had forgotten that we had ever had wet feet in our life. It was her walnut trees that beguiled iis. When should we again see walnut trees quite so huge or quite so graceful, or (next afternoon when the country was drenched m sunshine and the ground so dry that it could be lain upon without even a rug) quite so beneficient in the matter of providing dappled shadow when the heat was such that shade of some sort was a necessity. Sprawled beneath the walnut trees we could look out and see the mauve foothills of the Alps across a stretch of coloured fields, or down and see the white and red and yellow flowers with which our hostess’s garden was adorned, or up and see the chinks of the sky, now so placid and so blue; and all the time a warm wind blew the branches, and the leaves rustled, and we felt cool and Pleasant and infinitely at peace. Let the walnut trees be our headquarters, we decided, and the place to which we should return after every jaunt. For three days we rested beneath them. On the fourth, prompted by our sense of duty more than by our desires, we got into our hostess’s car, bade farewell to our trees in the meantime, ■ and drove to Lake Tekapo, whence, we said, we would go on up to Pukaki and then to Mount Cook itself, provided there was sunshine. Actually, there was sunshine. But there was wind, too. And for the first time in our experience we found wind an enemy, for it was blowing from places where there was snow, and was as bitter and icy as Masefield’s whetted knife. “This is lovely Tekapo,” we said the first day, before the wind had come sliding into the soft waters or the milky-blue lake at noon, and pitching our tents under the larch trees at evening.

“ Is this lovely Tekapo? ” we asked next morning, feeling like lost souls as we wandered round looking for a place where we might be free from the torment of the incessant blowing and finding none anywhere. Not all our clothes could keep us warm, nor was there any direction from which the wind did not blow. Only in that beautiful little church of grey stone . and brown wood, with , a window behind the altar showing the mountains and the lake and everything in the simplest and most perfect taste was there any tranquillity at all. But we could spend only a limited time in church. We endured for one day. We endured for two days, Then the trials of cooking outside with mufflers wrapped about ’ our ears, and smoke and ashes gushing up into our eyes became more than we could bear, and, leaving behind us the silver birches, with their chintzy pattern of leaves and the larches with their exquisite cones and soaring, jagged boughs, we rushed back helter-skelter to the walnut trees to plan some new sort of campaign. " Where is that hut? ” we demanded. “We want a hut —walls and a fireplace if there is going to be any more wind. We don’t like tents. We never did like tents. Let us go quickly to the hut.” So once more we motored off through the beautiful Canterbury country laid out with gracious artlessness —green field against brown field, gold field against primrose field, everything sloping and finished and serene, with groves of trees giving character to the smoothness as dark brows give character to a face, and nothing anywhere to jar. We drove through a plantation which, in autumn, is said to burn with colour and has trees like columns in a cathedral, and little by little approached the mountains which were not so far away after all. That evening we slept on the floor of a granary to an accompaniment of farmyard noises, and next day, complete with horse and dray, set off along the side of the river to find our hut. It was at the foot of Mount Fox, in the Two Thumb Range, with the Butler Pass a little to the north and Mesopotamia and the Erewhon country on the other side. It had three bunks and a capacious fireplace and walls that could withstand the fiercest gale. When we came to it it was a day similar to that we had encountered in Timaru, raining as if all the clouds in Heaven had burst at once, and as cold as only mountain cold can be. “ Blessed place! ” we said fervently, hieing ourselves inside and thinking of. tents' that people have to pitch, but not these people, praise be! We were prepared to let it rain all the time we were there, so contented were we to be under cover. But the gods treated us with be-

nignity and gave us such sunshine as comes to holiday-makers only rarely in a lifetime. What did we do while we were there? Climb? Yes, but not Fox! The fates seemed determined to prevent our making that climb. Perhaps there was a taniwha in one of the lakes at the top and wc wore being porcibly prevented from falling foul of him., At any rale, plan as we might, something always happened to prevent our getting to the top of Fox. Walk? Yes—miles and miles, across valleys and hills, with knee-high grass brushing our bare legs as we went and making seeping, whispering sounds in the wind, and holding daisies and dandelions and little blue mountain flowers in a pattern of delicate tracery. Bathe? Yes. in foapiing pools so white that we looked as brown as ferns against their brilliant water. And sleep? Yes—sleep and rest, once, moreover, outside, with a half-moon to light us when we fell into dreams, and a roof of stars to meet our gaze when, waking at midnight, we stared out, fascinated, into the darkness. F,verything was simplicity itself, and yet there was something novel all the time. A nor’-wester, for instance, rushing down the valley one night and threatening to blow us away, but when challenged in the midst of its abandon, proving to be only a sound and a swiftness without malice of any sort, though, heard through the tin walls of the hut. it gave an impression completely different. Unexpected incidents like those kept us interested all the while. Our 10 days at the hut were gone before we realised. Before returning to our various destinations we went back for a last look at the walnut trees. We found them as beautiful as ever, as green and lofty and shimmering and spreading, and as covered with fruit which, by and by, would yield more of those fine-shelled, sweet-tasting, knobbly nuts that had come.to be associated with our visit there. The holiday, despite its lack of plans, had been a good and successful one and we were going home again bronzed and happy ' with that contented, rested look in our eyes that comes from days profitably spent. The walnut trees, however, had from the first stood to us as a sign of permanency and reliability. So we paid them special homage before turning on our heels and went home with the image of their branches painted for ever on our metnory.