MOUNTAIN LOVE.

Waikato Times, Volume 102, Issue 17078, 16 April 1927, Page 13 (Supplement)

MOUNTAIN LOVE.

SHRINES RICH WITH MEMORIES.

(By Darius.)

There is always one fine regret in the heart of our native-born —that his fair homeland has been given the name of New Zealand. It is a worse name than Nova Scotia, and almost as bad as Newfoundland, than which nothing in naming could be less inspiring. Unfortunately the bad names thrown hastily about by adventurous navigators and discoverers have stuck beyond possibility of removal in our day, but a thousand years hence the name New Zealand may have so far lost its significance as to be re-christened after the aboriginal race that Tasman and Cook found inhabiting the Long Islands.

In spite of her remoteness and her disquieting name, the country is passing, by the sway of her beauty and grandeur, to a high place among the physical excellencies of earth, for to millions on our globe a place of beauty .will always be a shrine —a retreat in which imagination loves to dwell and enrich with memories, and to which, if absent for a time, it will return again, in times of both joy and sorrow.

The Coming of the Pilgrims.

Already the pilgrims are coming through our gales. It may be imagined that both come for sport, "but it is not so. Certainly many like physical as well as mental change, for thus comes the real holiday. The stag on the hills, the duck on the marsh, the trout in the long pool below the tumbling sluice of broken water, certainly offer attractions that no silent, lifeless place 'has to offer. New Zealand does not offer the wide prospect of the Austral plain. Here we are not haunted by thoughts of the illimitable and the unattainable. They say a man never feels so lonely as when he is a stranger in a crowd: but no loneliness so strikes to the soul of man and chills him to the marrow in his bones as that felt when he stands, an atom centre of a seemingly boundless plain. Do you know what it is to he so encompassed .with solitude as to be almost afraid to breathe? There arc desert and night silences that as effectually imprison a man for a time as prison walls and bar—because though unsubstantial as shadows in the dawn, they hold and press in upon one and defy the physical being into an utter and pitiable subjection. There over the rim of the vast even as it arose, so sets the ensanguined sun. When man stands in a domain fenced by infinitude he is as helpless as one seeking out the springs of the sea, and walking in search of its depth. He knows how the light comes up out of the East and dies down into darkness in the West, yet he cannot but ask himself: “Where is the way where light dwelleth, and as for darkness where is the place thereof?” Glad am lat all times to have a hill within hail, with panorama, aye, even of an horizon hill, to break tiie march to Infinity. North and South. “One dream is mine no savag-e toil can mar, The white peak rising to the evening star.” Strange as it may seem, there are in New Zealand’s small compass two distinct islands and two distinct peoples. In the first instance the physical features are widely different, and in the second there is a temperamental difference, so that one going from North to South speaks of the latter almost as if it were a strange country, and the people scarcely akin. But for the mountains in their primeval glory they cannot find terms of sufficient praise. It is- good to go by the coast and see the chief cities. To go from Invercargill to Kingston and Queenstown, and on through the wonderful gorge to Cromwell and so to ■Mount Cook. There one might write a long epistle of praise by merely naming names. There is now a very fertile valley all along the Clutha’s foaming course to Roxburgh. I remember leaving that little town under the mountain in the dark of a winter morning, when all trace of the highway was hidden beneath a recent snowfall, yet the good team Uoundered on through the powdery drift, in the steely cruel starlight. When the slow dawn came and the full, crisp morning, wo were all right, clanking down past Speargrass into Dunstan Town in Ilis Majesty’s mail coach. Who could forget the names of those rivers and mountains and plains—Five rivers, Kawarau, Molyneux, Manapouri, Hawea, Maniototo, aye, even Bannockburn (the Lord knows why) and Ida Valley, a beautiful name that never returns to memory without the accompaniment of Tennyson’s lines:

“There lies a yale in Ida lovelier Tar Than all the valleys of lonian hills.”

And there, too, the swimming vapour slopes athwart the glen, and Paris may occasionally be seen, “white-breasted like a star, fronting the dawn,” Stevenson wrote of the hills of Home, but where did he ever seen such hills as these at Home?

There Lies the Land.

The love of the hills must be bred in a man. I know I dream of a mountainous Paradise—mailed and tremendous Himalayas and Andes of surpassing bulk and heavenly attributes. God must surely be amongst tremendous physical grandeur and awesome beauty. Have you not heard His seven angels sounding their seven trumpets amongst the mountains, and seen a great mountain burning with fire cast into the sea, and a great star fall from on high burning as though it. were a lamp, at the blast of the third trumpeter, and the sun smitten and the third part of the moon at the blast of the fourth trumpeter, When the spiritual and the physical forces come into motion there are heroic doings. Never do I see far and lonely P.uapehu rising to the morning heavens but I long for Mountain Land, where —

Cold and clear on dome and spear The starlight now Is ratling, And far and high within the sky

The cataract Is calling.

No hungry generations tread them down, and the memories of them remain along the years like tombs of pilgrims that have died upon the road to Palestine.