THE MAORI AND THE MOUNTAINS by JOHN PASCOE Floating down the river Teramakau. (Engraving in London Illustrated News.)

(1) WARRIORS AND GREENSTONE HUNTERS The first part of this feature gives the background of Maori journeys across the Southern Alps and other mountains of the South Island. The second will detail the routes and the passes that are said to have been used. The author is a mountaineer who has himself travelled over and photographed many of the places described, and who has specialised in historical research about the Southern Alps. South is South and North is North, and the differences that divide them are sometimes as deep as Cook Strait. Mountain travel in the North Island was eased with a network of trails well-known to the different tribes, whose guides led the pakeha on many journeys claimed as pakeha exploration. In the South it was higher and more rugged, peaks soared to the sky and glaciers on their flanks twisted and tumbled till they fed swift and dangerous rivers. Here in this mountain region of the Southern Alps, adventurous pakehas could indeed explore the lands they wished to graze, where they sought gold, or merely new horizons. But before the pakeha and even in the mountainous South, there were some routes where Maori enterprise and Maori courage had been the first to conquer the distances and the solitude. The mountains were not empty of bird life. Above the snow, the skirts of the kea raised echoes. In the bush the choruses of the bellbird and tui, the whirr of the berry-bellied pigeon, and the night cries of the kiwis and wekas were but routine. The skylines were stark in their grandeur. Snow ebbed and flowed according to season, but over the higher ranges there was perpetual ice. Many of the rock ridges were broken, as though they were designed for teeth in a saw. Some precipices were several thousands of feet high, made, as it were, to terrify any intruders. The breaks in these ranges, formed natural saddles or passes, where strong and resolute men could cross from one valley to another valley. Do not talk of provinces, for the times that you must now contemplate are before the pakeha, when a riverbed was the road