The Immemorial Rocks.

There, in the park, one has an unexpected reminder of Antarctic adventure, the great boulder with its inscription to the heroic Captain Scott. The slopes are strewn with such great rocks, now half-covered with trailing climbing vegetation. They are ancient beyond reckoning, the moraine rocks of the glacier that once came snaking down where the blue water now fills Wakatipu's winding trench. I remember once an old Irish farmer friend of mine in the North discussing such rocky finger-posts to the past when we were talking over experiences at the base of the Southern Alps. Just such ice-striated boulders, smooth-backed roches moutonnees as are seen in abundance on these lowlands far from any present glacier, he had seen in his native mountains of Wicklow, the reminder of a remote glacial age. “When I was a small boy,” he said, “I asked my father what made those curious markings like deep scratches, on the rocks. His reply was, ‘Those marks, my lad, were made by the teeth of God's harrows.’”

It was an even more poetic concept, that Irish countryman's fancy, than the Maori legend of Rakaihaitu and his mighty ko, the ice-plough of the Alps.