From Ben Lomond Top.

That was a first impression of deep dark Wakatipu. I saw it from a very different viewpoint a few days later. Three of us climbed (on horseback) Ben Lomond; we started from our Queenstown hotel before dawn, and we watched the morning magnificence of the sun breaking through the sea of mist that lay around us—we were literally above the clouds there—and looked around at the darker sea of mountain tops, incredibly broken, shattered as if by ages of earthquake play, that stretched away for leagues upon leagues to north and east. It was from there that we saw the lake as a mountain kea might see it in his flight, or as an aviator might see it from his flying plane. It suggested at once some enormous snake of blue lying lazily watchful, coiling its slow length among the mountains. It appeared from this high look-out place a lighter blue than it was five thousand feet below. It lay as quiet as could be; the morning breezes had not set in, and we saw the currents and flows that slightly darkened its surface like little rivers of blue oil.