The Urewera Highlands.

The scenes in which Preece and his comrades searched for their enemies now and again surprising a camp and fighting a skirmish, were wild and rugged in the extreme—a seemingly endless succession of forested ranges and peaks, like mountainous waves of green, intersected by profound ravines and dark wooded valleys, through which rocky-bedded streams came down in noisy twistings. Range after range rising to cloudy heights, some scarped in wall-sided precipices of grey rock, framed in bush and ferns. In the forest there was a tangle of coiling aka lianas, ropelike vines and supple-jacks, with vast gardens of ferns, especially that soft feathery glory of the bush the todea superba. The jungly bush was beautiful to the eye of a peaceful traveller, but an inferno of impediments to the swag-laden soldier and the explorer. No roads, scarcely a track, the beds of the mountain streams were usually the best highways. This Urewera highland region, extending from the Rangitaiki River to Lake Waikaremoana and beyond was the formidable country in which Te Kooti evaded the Government expeditions for nearly three years, and except for two or three roads and the clearing of some forest valleys it is still in much the same condition in essentials. But the Urewera people have changed; they have schools and there are European-built dwellings, and there are a store or two and a couple of post offices; and the tribesfolk are no longer the bushy-headed warriors and scouts they were in Te Kooti's day.