38 TUTIRA 



off by under-runners to the sea that vast, barren, grassless flat which 

 does not carry a sheep to ten million acres. About the sandstone forma- 

 tions of the run especially about the softer sandstones their ramifi- 

 cations are most highly developed. The "Dome" and "Dead Man's 

 Hill " 1 in central Tutira exemplify in an extreme degree this network 

 of tunnellings : their steep slopes are everywhere honeycombed with 

 hollows. Hardly a grain of sand-weathering is deposited on the sur- 

 face. In rain-storms it is washed directly off the surface of the melt- 

 ing cone into tunnels, whose circular, open, funnel-shaped mouths seem 

 actually to gape for it. As on the marls of the east a water sandwich is 

 formed, so here again similar conditions are re-enacted with the 

 substitution of sandstone rock for marl. Tutira remains unfertilised, 

 constituents that might be supporting grass and sheep are rushed to 

 the hungry ocean, the old original sin of worthless humus persists 

 almost to the rounded sandstone cones. Although the land surround- 

 ing these rain-scoured, wind-blown, melting solitaries has sunk scores, 

 even hundreds of feet, yet always the worst soil the dusty humus 

 has contrived to remain on top. 



1 So called from the discovery of a human skull and bones scattered by pig, but evidently 

 when first found those of a man but recently dead. We surmise that the poor chap may have 

 at first missed his way on the high tops, may have in an exhausted state seen the lake, and in 

 making for it become trapped in the gorges of the central run. At any rate, a few yards back 

 from the edge of one of these precipices lay the bones. The remains of two other men have 

 been in my day discovered on Tutira. In the one case they were those of a European, in the 

 other those of a Maori. Near the skeleton of the latter lay a fragment of fire-bleached green- 

 atone. 



