8 TUTIRA 



the interior ; deluges that break on the coastal hills do not, or at any 

 rate do not always, reach inland. When on one occasion over seventeen 

 inches in two days were measured on the homestead lawn, there was 

 not on the track below the "Image" hill, distant some three miles 

 from the stance of the rain-gauge, enough rain to wash away the 

 dust from the trampled stock route. 



Kain on the western rim of the run falls in the form of frequent 

 showers, or when a coastal deluge does reach the ranges of the interior, 

 it falls with an attenuated precipitation. Generally speaking, not only 

 is the rainfall of Tutira about double that of Napier, only ten or twelve 

 miles distant as the crow flies, but there is a sapidity in the atmosphere, 

 perhaps owing to the enormous quantity of deep gorges, increasingly 

 noticeable inland. When southern Hawke's Bay is brown, the hills of 

 Tutira are often green as leeks. Never in forty years have I known 

 grass slopes fronting south or east fit to carry a fire ; not more than half 

 a dozen times have I seen hillsides facing north and west burnt brown. 



These details of rainfall have been given not merely as meteor- 

 ological data of an impersonal sort ; the climate of Tutira has deeply 

 affected the fortunes of the station. As the reader will later be shown, 

 excessive rainfall has been the bane of the place, retarding its develop- 

 ment by years. 1 



To recapitulate : The original shape of Tutira has been either a 

 single elevated plain, or more probably a series of plateaux. At a 

 later period, owing to extraneous subsidence, this terrain has tilted 

 towards the east, leaving the station approximately in its present 

 form a series of eastward -facing slopes, with a precipitous back to 

 each of them. Consentaneously the many hill-chains of the run have 

 come into being, not through upheaval from beneath, but by the one 

 edge of the plateau rising as the other dipped. The outstanding 

 physical features of Tutira, its lakes, its waterfall, its hidden rivers, 

 its double cliff system the dry, remarkable for its far-seen alternat- 

 ing bands of strata, the wet, for its hanging curtains of fern have 

 been described. Lastly, the reader's attention has been drawn to the 

 rainfall of the run. 



1 Not all records are published. One observer whose case I recall was requested by 

 neighbours to cease to forward his returns. " Science may be right enough, perhaps, in its 



E roper place," they declared, " but he was ruining the district and hampering settlement with 

 is blessed rainfalls." 



