n 4 6 AUSTRALASIA ILLUSTRATED. 



both sides, densely-wooded to their very brows, and with fleecy streamlets coursing 

 down their rugged and impressive fronts. 



Of this wonderful Gorge the Rev. Charles Clark has said : " I cannot pretend to 

 describe in detail this glorious region. It lives in my memory as a succession of 

 forests, mountains, lakes and water-falls, as brilliant and fascinating as the most vivid 

 fancy could depict, or the most exacting eye desire. There were bold hills covered with 

 luxuriant foliage, the rich trees waving in the transparent air, backed by the white 

 summits of still loftier ranges, upon whose surface, now delicate and lovely, now mon- 

 strous or grotesque, the changeful light wrought itself in a magical variety of contrasted 

 colours ; deep solitary ravines, walled in by precipitous cliffs devoid of verdure, and 

 overhanging the dark swift streams that swirl about their bases, dismal to the eye and 

 oppressive to the heart ; miles upon miles of road, smooth and well-kept as the avenues 

 of an English park, running through the dense undergrowth of stately fern-trees and an 

 endless variety of blooming creepers, that, interwining each with other, formed an impene- 

 trable jungle. The trunks and even the loftiest branches of the huge trees were coated 

 with moss and hung with ferns, and looked like bearded Druids, some clasped in the 

 writhing coils of dark-stemmed rata vines, and yielding slowly to the insidious parasites 

 which sap their vitals, while they make gay the surfaces of their life. There were 

 hundreds of delicious chines, any one of which would make the fortune of its owner 

 could it be transferred to Devonshire or the Isle of Wight ; nooks where the sunshine 

 steals in and goes to sleep and the winds breathe in soft whispers, festooned with 

 trailing ferns and carpeted with fairy mosses, and overhung .with dripping boughs that 

 catch a brighter green from the translucent water that from a shelf of rock live 

 hundred feet above comes leaping, sparkling, dancing, gurgling, dashing, and performing 

 all the antics with which Southey credits the waters that come down the Lodore. This 

 is the finest cascade in the Gorge, and is supplied by an Alpine lake lying three thou- 

 sand feet above the sea, and called the 'Devil's Punchbowl.'" 



At the summit of the Gorge stands the stake that marks the boundary line between 

 the provinces of Canterbury and Westland. Down the deep descent of Arthur's Pass 

 the tourist proceeds until, at a point more than a thousand feet lower than the head 

 of the Gorge, he reaches comparatively level ground again, strikes thence across the 

 shingly bed of the Bealey, plunges into the bush, crosses the Waimakariri near its 

 source, follows its course for some distance as it winds about amid romantic mountain 

 scenery, and then finishes this stage at the Bealey. 



The last stage of the passage over the mountain ends at Porter's Pass, the top of 

 which is crowned by a telegraph post, the highest in the colony, and the Rev. Charles 

 Clark, who approached it from the Christchurch, or eastern side, thus graphically 

 describes what he saw : " Steadily . for an hour we climbed up the Pass, down which the 

 coach bowls on its return journey in ten minutes, the road a mere shelf scooped out 

 of the hill-side, and zig-zagging on the brink of the precipice in a highly picturesque 

 and nervous fashion. . . . We were now fairly among the mountains, the road as it 

 wound among the foot-hills seeming to be blocked up at every turn by the heights that 

 appeared to crowd together for the purpose of gazing at us over one another's shoulders. 

 Late in the afternoon we opened on a broad sunny valley, and saw on a distant hill- 



