Into the Ongarue.

Behold us, then, two days later, a sufficiently rough-looking band, mounted on our sturdy Maori ponies, trailing in single file down the mountain side from the Poro-o-tarao, and opening up a wide, wild prospect of green forests and blue ranges, far-spreading valleys, and silver river peeps, with great rugged kopje-like crags of volcanic rock building a skyline on the south. No wheel roads then, in ’Ninety-two; the only way was a horse track. Below us lay the valley of the Ongarue; we had crossed the divide from the Mokau head waters, and all the streams we saw and forded thenceforth went to swell the Wanganui River.

We rode down into the Ongarue Valley, winding through the tall fern and groves of tawa and rimu, down into the gravel of that divinely clear Maramataha, a tributary stream cascading past the little Maori village of Waimeha from the tableland of the Maraeroa; that way lay the vast unknown West Taupo country.

We cantered over the pumice flats, now and again fording the bright river and skirting Maori cultivations of potatoes and maize on the sheltered terraces.

From the Ongarue, at Te Kawakawa—just about where Ongarue railway station stands to-day, we turned off sharply to the west, between two mighty green hills; and then south-west-ward ho! for the Taranaki bush and Stratford a hundred miles away.