BACK O' BEYOND.

Otago Witness, Issue 3312, 5 September 1917, Page 61

BACK O' BEYOND.

By Nktta. There acre some persons to whom even the miseries of Midas are worth the thrill. Had the present writer been such a one the thrill would undoubtedly have come while eyeing a perfectly sound and honourable cheque, backed by Majesty, and knowing that, in the first place, one's chance of realising on it was at the moment as rosy as that of Noah's dove would have been with the ark only a month afloat, and that, in the second place, gold and silver itself could purchase no human necessities without the immediate intervention of an aeroplane or Prince Houssain's magic carpet. That latter enchanted means of transit forlornly suggests a fairy song —" I know a bank." Yes, there is a bank, ten miles away, rearing a solid front amid a rapidly-dissolving world, hastening back to the oozy chaos of the prime. But these grievous, devious Scots miles are determined by a track as elusive, as personally unnegotiable, as those alleged zones which girdled the earth with superfluous equinoctial mysteries in our youth. If imaginary lines led to all this geographical hocus-jpocus, why imagine them when tlie mind could anchor on blessed certainties like " Sydney or Port Jackson," or "Smyrna for figs"? In the same way, why fatigue the mind with an equation of an imaginary bank or an imaginary oasis ten imaginary miles away, when the available facts are a thousand miles of primeval slime and slosh and the last megatherium of drought decamped in the night? Or was it a magatherium? Shem, we remember, recalled a pet roadster ending in "urn" when the Immortals held conference regarding the vanished houseboat on the Styx. But how < can one bridge the intervening millenniums to verify the quotation? If you asked tho *Back o' Beyonders about John Kendrick Bangs they would reply, " Do you cut it with a saw ?" A particularly intelligent specimen might inquire, "Is it one of them new blokes running the war in Russia?"

Your true Beyonder has only two thoughts—timber and the war. You would not call him a flower by any stretch of fancy, and the forest now visible hereabouts is but the lonely company of black and broken trunks that filled the green hillsides with memories of fire and ruin. But presently you realise that here is something of the sap that stirred in those "Flowers o' the Forest" who w r ent so joyfully to a worse quarrel when the world was younger —a sap that stirs not in the flaccid fibres that jerk to nothing, but the wires in the professional hand of the Labour Boss. Presently you will discover that though "two women and a goose make a market," in their land a letter from Featherston camp circulates from one logger's hut to another in something the same way as the monthly "news letter" from the world of fashion and quality made its welcome rounds in the provincial hinterlands of Addison's day. And the writer will have been the last eligible' of his circle: the flapper with the white feather would walk far in these fire-swept solitudes before she could deliver her wonted subpcana to appear in the court of Mars. "Teens," fiery and final, can think of nothing but th& gallows on which the Kaiser is to expiate all the evil that has chanced since 1914, after which all will go merrily as of yore. "Forty-six," worn wise with many bufferings of wind and fate, is no less willing to erect the gallows of retribution, but would leave room on it for the Kaisers at home, whose unctuous periods may suffice for Wellington, but are merely a bag of holes to the man who feels the pinch of the middleman and life's hard logic down where things grip and words are air. How many glib formulte of social orthodoxy suddenly' lose point when "Forty-six," in his slow, tentative way, begins to cut the ground from under mine magnate, profiteer, and Red-Fed alike. He is very slow about it: the lamp-post is the forcing-bed of oratory for the urban politician ; but there are no lamps save the " parish lantern" Back o' Beyond, and her horned brilliance is nothing but a veiled memory behind the riftless rain cloud. For we have wandered from the immediate problem of finance and 'ocoihotion that. strikes the exile with a sense that Time and the Clerk of the Weather have stopped for some celestial game of Patience; hence the general return to "sixes and sevens" in this dateless corner of creation. _ Without church or store, or even Civilisation's forerunner in the wild, a blacksmith's shop, the sudden call of the wilderness finds us unready. What if a shoelace broke? What 'if a hatpin snapped? What if ? A thousand eventualities throng upon the mind. Man the polyartist, woman the all-contriver—how they have fallen from the old self-reliance when our peace is held at no higher price than a broken shoelace or a lost safetypin! True, there is an emporium, they sav, under the shadow of that phantom bank. But how to send across those angry young rivers, tearing on in their deep*channels, narrow and scarped? Howto thread the long, yellow slough that calls itself a road, and hangs sheer above long precipices, under sunless redoubts, from which drop a hundred tiny creeklete to swell the churned confusion below? One looks east, west, north, and south, and realises the clip-winged feeling of a bird in an avian-—go where you will the wire netting pulls you up. A dull curiositv grows as the rain grumbles on week after week—not a clean, large downpour that washes sin off the face of creation; just a sullen sticking to business, a drawing off now, a grudging break again, then a methodical, quiet emptying of the celestial water-pots. Has the Back o* Beyond been placed sheer under some water-parting from which the umbrellas of Olympus drain unceasingly? Under what watery star were ite hills and hollowe shaped? Are we

really in some land east o' the sun and west o' the moon, where the ordinary laws of Nature are suspended ? After a while philosophy comes to one's aid. There is the odd consciousness of new physical powers—a puffed-up frogginess, so to speak, that follows the tadpole state. One does not run now, nor amble, nor walk. No; locomotion becomes a series of jerboa-jumps. One springs like an ibex from peak to peak, from island to island, in the ambient mud. There is no looking to right or left, no communing either with humankind or Nature, while pursuing the daily objective. There is something exhilarating in the journey—the pulsing excitement of a gamble with Fate. Will one make that tussock-head on the other side of that swollen runlet? Will, that clay-edge hold as it skirts that yellow, greasy sea, and runs sheer above that seething culvert? Here some elephant-footed Beyonder has stamped out a chain of hoof-marks : is it host to drop into them or to trust the displaced ridges beside them? One learns, too, to have a kind of scientific discernment of a footway so clamant. Mud? Yes, one had thought mud'a fairly homogeneous proposition in that upper world so long receded from the view. Not a bit of it. This is Nature's sample-room of earth in solution. Red mud, yellow mud, grey mud, black mud, brown mud —you cannot take your choice ; but you are sure of a bounteous variety. One wonders how long it will take to acquire the true saurian affinity for mud, for one notes that the young Beyonders, at least, have taken to it as to a' fifth element. Instinctively they make for it, booted or barefoot; unconsciously they seek out the splodgiest, most oleaginous, and clinging portions of it: they wallow in their walk and revel in the suck and splosh of every yard of it. Torn from it by an iron cede of necessity, they carry in all they can of it on boots and person to temper the aridity, of scholarships. One hears them feeling for it with uncouth jerks and starts under the desks as one hears a a dog hunting in his dreams: sliding for it, burrowing for it—in fine, " galumphing " for it. Lewis Carroll hit the very verb two generations ere the Back o' Beyond was redeemed from the utter welter of the prime under the frown of the forest that crowned its hills a bare dozen of wintei's back. '

A watery cycle of weeks has gone by, and one is forced to admit a modicum of reason in the young saurians' love of mud. For at last one learns that there are two seasons at the Back o' Beyond —the wet and the windy,—and though science must needs admire this even balance of Nature, the sequence is beyond human bearing. This is the Cave of the Winds—the throne of old Tawhiri-Matea himself is yonder black range, from which swoop the young whirlwinds to chase each other up *gsiL down these mazy gullies. Wind ? iW Zealand air is mainly in motion all the time; but there are seemly limits in most centres. When the unoffending alien is lifted bodily off his feet and spilt neatly along a new-caked yellow rut he goes 'home expecting a hearing for perils passed. But when the old identities indicate with chilly gravity that the windy season hasn't commenced, and that nothing but a waking zephyr has transpired as yet, he lays his hand upon bin mouth in silence, and remembers the ominous list to port of the young trees on the hill. He learns betimes that the same generous test that determines impeached sobriety in Ireland applies to wind in tfcis Borean clime: it is not blowing anything to speak of at the Back o' Beyond so long as one can lie on the ground without holding on ! If the Rev. D. C. Bates and Mr Clement Wragge really want to knit up the ravelled ends of the weather, why do they not arrange for an observatory in these parts? Something awful has happened hereabouts; but whether it is that the isotherms have got loose, or the isobars have broken down, or the law of gravitation has ceased to operate we arc too " weathered " and flustered to speculate.