The Tangarakau Gorge.

We were hundreds of feet on our woody ledge above the growling Tangarakau. We could not see into the depths, but the river's voice came up from the profound canyon. Sometimes there would be a lull, then the river sounds would come loud and swelling; and from this side and that we heard minor torrents all rushing down to pay tribute to the main river.

The morning light showed us a grand ravine at our feet, with a rapid-whitened, rock-strewn, snag-cumbered river tearing along between lofty ranges blanketed in forest from base to skyline. We struck camp by six in the morning, crossed to the opposite side of the river by rocks and fallen trees, and tramped and clambered all day down the proper right bank of the defile. Tangarakau was an appropriate name; it means to fell trees. The timber debris of a thousand floods was strewn along the bottom of the gorge. On the left bank the land rose into bluffs almost perpendicular to a height of five or six hundred feet above the river, which was itself at the thousand-feet level above the sea. Tangled bush clung to the papa precipice, rose in a cloud of green to the skyline, leaving here and there a wall of white rock too straight for even the New Zealand jungly forest to maintain a roothold. Streams white-lined the green and blue of the mountain side, appearing and reappearing through the trees. Blue page 27 mountain duck, the whio, or “whistler” of the Maoris, swam in the quiet pools.

It was a toilsome day along the wooded mountain side—less steep, fortunately, than the mighty parapet of rock across the river—and climbing in and out of the many tributary creeks. A wild bit of New Zealand then, where the road and railway run to-day.