FIJI-NEW ZEALAND EXPEDITION 321 
In places there are thousands of acres of burnt-off land. These 
desolate areas are expressive of man’s waste of valuable timber 
and it seems a pity that these fine forests or at least the lumber 
they contain cannot be preserved. 
At a big bend in the river we pass through the old town of 
Lyell built upon and surrounded by enormous gravel terraces 
which in the sixties were washed for gold. Lyell then boasted 
ten to fifteen thousand inhabitants. The whole region was 
sluiced thoroughly for its gold but only rotting dredges and 
tumbled shacks on abandoned claims remain to tell of the time 
when the region yielded the biggest gold nugget ever found in 
New Zealand and of the struggles of gold-crazed men in the 
pathless forest penetrated only by the raging Buller. 
Placer mining has largely ceased but not until hundreds of 
thousands of ounces of gold had been recovered in this region 
alone. Today lode-mining is extensively carried on, and we had 
the good fortune to see something of the diggings at Reefton 
which is located on the Inangahua river some miles above its 
junction with the Buller. At this gold mining center the cyanide 
process is employed for recovery of the metal. The main mines 
are at Crushington where the quartz is pulverized. Some of the 
underground workings are miles in length and penetrate the 
mountain from one side to the other. There is plenty of avail- 
able water for all purposes diverted from the numerous mountain 
streams. Hydroelectric plants furnish an abundance of cheap 
electric power. We were told that the production of gold to 
date in the Reefton area is upwards of £5,000,000. 
Below Inangahua Junction the Buller valley again narrows 
into a remarkable gorge. We passed the famous Fern Arch and 
stopped to get a snapshot of Hawk’s Crag which is a notch eut 
into the side of the rock wall of the valley in such a way that 
there is rock below, on one side of, and above the ear; the un- 
protected side looks down hundreds of feet to the stream below. 
The forest is again very dense, and the bush contains in addi- 
tion to the ordinary trees an abundance of tree ferns, ‘‘King’’ 
ferns, and many others. It is a wonderland for a botanist. For 
a hundred miles the vegetation is massed together along this 
drive exhibiting an endless variety which to our northern eyes 
is strange and novel. One longs for a tramp through the 
thickets, to the foot of some towering rimu and on to the slopes 
of the distant mountains whose dense forests appear and re- 
