Behold the Ohura!

From a hilltop, where our horse track cork-screwed through tall fern and bright green bushes of tupakihi with its clusters of black tutu berries, we had our first look-out over the Ohura Valley, and the seemingly interminable forest, a “boundless contiguity of shade” that stretched from the shadowy undulations below almost to the base of Mount Egmont, over the ranges and far away. A huge and shaggy and lonely land it was. No green field, no fence, no house or even tent, no smoke of settlers' burning-off fire, gave civilised touch to the silent expanse. Valley and hill and glinting stream and dark solemn forest lay bathed in soft blue haze, mysterious, unpeopled; as untouched by man, it seemed to me gazing over it there, as it might have been a thousand years ago.

“Take a good look at the Ohura,” said “Wirihana,” turning in his saddle; “this is the last bird's-eye view you'll get of it.”

And this was true, for in the days that followed we had no such comprehensive eye-sweep page 44 of the promised land. We were in the tall timber, and not even a climb to a rata top would have given us a commanding view of the huge jumble of wooded ranges that lay around our trail.

The last day of our three days' ride we spent skirting by a bush road the dark, slow-moving Ohura. We camped in the open, getting out of our blankets regretfully in the cold and foggy dawn. We passed three deserted Maori camps of thatch and ferntree trunk, at Makara, Nihoniho and Toitoi. Then it was pikau and footslog through the roadless forest.