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Rangi's Artistry
A Rotorua Picture

(By James Cowan.)

Here, at Rotorua, nearly a thousand feet above the sea, the sky pageant is often a picture to remember. There was a late afternoon when one rambled along the pumice shore between the Utu-hina River and Te Koutu. The light westerly breeze died away as the sun declined; the Lake lay still and smooth in long calm breadths, steely blue, and pearlshell tinting, yonder a shadowing of the dark clouds that hung low in the warm atmosphere. Sounds carried a long way—the jump of trout and splash of ducks and gulls, the frog baritone and bass, and here and there a throaty contralto. For half an hour before setting over Mount Ngongotaha's shoulder the sun threw glints of gold across the far shore of the lake. Then we had the spectacle of the bluff headland of Owha-tiura and its tall trees standing out in a fiery glow against the background of indigo; Owhata Hill, too, a rounded mount of yellow dazzle; behind it the black-blue mass of cloud-hatted Whakapounga-kau. Mokoia Island lay dark and ghostly, an isle of portent; not a gleam of light illuminated its grave silence. There were green and opal and turquoise in the lake—shades of calm and breath-lessness. A gentle lap of waters on the pumice sands, then a pause of utter quiet.

The sun shone out its last moments above the fairy mountain, Ngongotaha. The heights lay black against the brilliance; the outlines so sharp that the tall trees were bristles on its summit, the Tuahu-o-te-Atua, where the gods dwelt of old. Then the heavenly blue looked through the clouds on the flanks of the sunset blaze. The sky cleared more and more in that direction until the north and west quadrant was all blue and white and gold. Cirrus clouds in a thousand little flecks like feathers softly curled against the blue; in the north there was a perfect pinion, wind-rifted on its edges, against it was a celestial fern-frond that turned to burning gold. There was a little wind up aloft there, for yellow-tinged clouds, like the sulphurous vapours that rise from White Island, drifted away eastward. A dark belly of a cloud impended over Moerangi Mountain. If it touched the ranges we might look for a rain burst. A blue airship, a mile long, swam over Whakapoungakau as if meditating some bomb dropping.

The eastern cumuli heightened by contrast the heavenly glory of the west. The sunward sky was speckled like the shining cuckoo; myriads of cloudlets white flecked Rangi's blue curve of dome; again it was the tawatawa sky of the Maori, mottled like the mackerel. Fair-weather sky that, we knew; the thunder clouds in the east were all part of Nature's grand film of make-believe.