“Lake Wakatipu I regard as in the front rank of tourist attractions of the world. One might spend a year in that locality and then not exhaust its glories. Queenstown (on the lakeside) is one of the prettiest spots on earth …” said a well-known European traveller before leaving the Dominion some time ago. Lake Wakatipu is reached by rail either from Dunedin or Invercargill. In the following article, specially written for the N.Z. Railways Magazine, Mr. James Cowan gives some impressions of the world-famed lake and the rugged grandeur of its setting.

When first I sailed along the South Arm of Lake Wakatipu from the rail-head at Kingston and gazed up at the tors and spikes and sword-blades of the strangely weathered mountains that precipitously parapeted its dark blue depths, I thought it was more like some sea-fiord than a far inland lake. Everything was built on such a scale that it seemed a part of a savagely bold sea coast. The waters in that sound, where a lead-line would go down a thousand feet or so, were of an uncanny stillness; not a ripple broke the surface until our steamer's bow cut through the unsunned floor and set it quivering in long undulations.

The late afternoon sun set the ancient cragtops glowing like incandescent rocks; down in the watery canyons, not more than a mile wide in places, it was as if one were in a deep river gorge into which the direct sunshine fell only at midday. It was very grand mountain architecture, and the play of colour on the summits was a picture of glory; but it was a relief to pass out from the narrows and see before us a wider vista of the lake, with the middle arm spreading away to the elbow on the west and north.

“We'll pe there in a ferry few minutes what-effer,” said my old Highland sheep-farmer acquaintance, who had a station, he told me, on the shore of the lake. Then I saw the sunlit white houses and soft-green plantations of Queenstown, as pretty a little town as one could find in the length of New Zealand—all the prettier for its contrast to the rather grim landscapes that hemmed it in.