THE SAND DUNES OF CANTERBURY.

Otago Witness, Issue 2409, 3 May 1900, Page 66

THE SAND DUNES OF CANTERBURY.

By Edith Suable Gkossiiann.

Geography is as fond as • history of repeating itself. In a freshly-opened country like our own, old-world travellers are often not so much surprised by the strangeness of the scenery as by its familiarity. Yet there is alwaj's difference enough for the likeness to give a thrill of surprise. Visions of Norway haunt our fiords, memories of Scotland linger among the rocks and bracken and mountain tarns of bleak Otago hillsides, while England has visibly transmigrated to the apple orchards and wheatfields and parks around Christcirarch ; a more barren, rugged Switzerland rises in the snow peaks and glaciers of our Alps, and the atmosphere of the North has the colour and glow of Italy ; along 'the north-east coast of Canterbury travelled residents find the historic dunes of Holland and Germany "done into Maori." This long reach of flat land lying between plain and meadow and open ocean is like,- and yet unlike, -the wastes thab front the North Sea and the Baltic, in whose centre was the little sea-nesb from which a mighty brood has come to swarm over all the earth. I am not going to predict an equally magnificent destiny for the seaside folk from Amberley to Sumner. Their 'highest reach of Pate will be — when all of the earth that is_ not a city is the suburbs of a city — that they shall have forests of trees whose feet will hold down the shifting desert soil, like the forests Napoleon planted along the Bay of Biscay ; then the swamps and bogs where the wild tui and the native flax are growing will have vanished to make way for long straight canals and dykes ; and where -scanty, rough grass now crowns the hillocks there will 'bloom level gardens of roses and geraniums and tulip beds. They will have to find some process first of laying the winds that haunt the whole tract .- tftie fog ghost of the east, clammy with the foam of the ocean ; the mad tyrant of the west that rushes down the mountain slopes hurling about aspiring sand heights and tossing up the levels, and ■confounding ocean, earth, and sky in a fury of sand and glaring sun and clouds, and the winter fiend creeping from the south and from the ends of the earth, dark with the mysteries of Reinga. But -the sand-dwellers- will tame all the genii in time. Let those -who doubt it drive along the old " New Brighton road in summer^ when the roses bloom in former haunts of (manuka scrub, or when the orchard blossoms bud among the little twinkling leaves of aspen and birch over some old swamp, and lefc them remember when Cathedral Square was a sandhill. The accomplishment of this destiny will most likely be enough for "the flat, unraised spirits*" of our Netherlands. Still, I am glad that day is "far off.

In all the islands there is scarcely so long a stretch of country as barren and desolate as this. If you climb upon the'] highest dunes, you can see mile upon mile ' of ridges, mock mountains and hollows, > grey-coloured, flowerlese, and grassless, an j ocean of sand billows. Yet all who have lived in such country will understand why the fascination of loveliness is ' scarcely so strong as that of wide-reaching desolate spaces. When in the brief pause -at dawn and sunset all the world is still there is something appalling in the naked beauty of these shapes, flushed with the first glow of .the skies. There they stand with the ' look of immemorial antiquity ; here a- peak, there a long curving range ; then some hollow deep below sea-level ; here a wind- | ing gorge or pass, and every pile carved with waving lines by the hands of the tide and the winds. As you trudge through this weary way that gives no foothold, you might think yourself a hundred miles from j town or village, for the dunes close all around, and the wide blue sky looks near , upon you. Not that the country is all < desert. From the Port Hills you can get a panorama of the whole scene, if the seamists nio not make the atmosphere too unsteady. Where the rivers flow there is marshy soil with cattle browsing among the pools, and a slight dash of colour in the dull dun herbage of the marshes. The Waimakariri, after all the magic of its I woodland, career and the monumental j " gates " that guard it, loses most of its romance on reaching this flat coast. But j the little Avon, tamest and most imitative i of rivers farther up, takes on a wider, freer appearance at its estuary. There it spreads out into a great expanse of water with sand ridges jutting out into it on one side, and on the other low fiat mud-banks covered with grey rushes below the water at high tide. Where the soil is richer a lonely farm house or two may be seen on the promontories, in a clump of stray firs and poplars. Along the course of the river inland, deep down among the ridges, there are in wet seasons tiny lakelets and pools that catch the blue sky and the drifting clouds above them. In many of these basins the sea water lingers from the last ' high tides. In the lupin tract you anight j bury yourself in the heart of those wild- | growing thickets, and no one would find your hiding place. Nothing is to 'be seen j ■but the undulating sea of green tipped with , spikes of yellow, and the scent of the sett is sweeter than honey. ,

Elsewhere on this coast the seasons scarcely come, but here spring visits not only the thickets, but the mounds from which the bushes have been cleared. Sometimes you" come upon a wild garden of nature : the pink convolvulus throwing wreaths around the sand shapes, and the little purple vetch giving a note of deeper colour, while the slender white flax scatters its petals at the least breath of wind, and the big bold-iaced mesem«ryantheimun outstares the sun and weathers the cyclone. Scarcely a living thing stirs in the solitude. Now and then a hare stands still to take a hurried glance around, then skurries away, or rabbits come swarming out of their underground barracks to take an

animal, bird, or insect in sight. Only if you lie at ease on the warm sand and gaze upwards, you may watch by day the passing wing of a sea-gull, and at night the long circling line of black swans throwing a shadow across the moon. Within these lupin enclosures even the fierce winds that torment the shifting sea ridges and the vexed' waves are silenced and at rest, and the beatin? of the .ocean dies away into a murmur.