The Nightmare Country.

“Very bad walking,” wrote Brunner of that return journey up the Buller, where our splendid smooth highway runs today. “The immense, gigantic rocks that belt the river rendered it impossible for us to keep to the bank, and the mountains were too high to ascend, so our day's walking was one continual ascending the spurs and decending the water courses, which only brought us on a short distance by nightfall.” No better picture of the untamed Buller Valley could have been given than this brief but sufficient scrap of topographical description.