re A Ra Se ea ee ee me 
Travers.—On the great Floods of February, 1868. 83 
is precipitated, which, upon the subsidence of the waters, presents the 
appearance of a bed of soft sandy mud. The Hanmer Plain appears also 
to be the bed of a former lake which had been gradually emptied by reason 
of the erosion of the rock in the gorge below it. 
Crossing this plain the road leads up a long spur to Jack’s Pass, a depres- 
sion in the mountain ridge on the north side of the plain, through which the 
valley of the Clarence is reached. I need scarcely say, that the scenery in the 
gorge, and upon the lines of road over the passes into the Clarence and the Upper 
Waiau-ua, is very beautiful, but I am compelled to omit any notice of it in 
this paper as foreign to the subject in hand, although I should like to dwell 
upon it. It is a curious circumstance that the valley of the Clarence lies 
but little below the upper level of Jack’s Pass, and that from the outlet of 
Lake Tennyson, for upwards of sixty miles of its course, it lies at an 
average altitude of 1,400 feet above, though parallel with the valley of the 
Waiau-ua, the level of Jack’s Pass being little less than 8,000 feet above 
that of the sea. Fowler's Pass, through which the Upper Waiau-ua is 
reached from the Clarence, is about twenty miles up the valley from Jack’s 
Pass, the saddle being from seven to eight hundred feet above the level of 
the valley, making the summit of the pass nearly 4,400 feet above sea-level. 
It is in these localities that the remarkable Alpine vegetation of New Zealand 
is found in its greatest luxuriance and in its most quaint and striking forms, 
whilst the air is not only delicious from its mere purity, but is always filled, 
and especially so in midsummer, with the perfume of many exquisitely 
scented mountain plants. 
The descent from Fowler’s Pass to Lake Guyon is extremely rapid, the 
track leading through broken rocky gorges, above which the mountains, 
rugged and bare, rise to an additional height of several thousand feet, the 
more sheltered spots in their northern aspect being rarely free from snow. 
The valley of the upper Waiau-ua lies below Lake Guyon, and was formerly 
filled by a huge glacier, formed and fed from the snows of the Spenser 
Mountains, the highest points of which, the Faery Queen, Mount Una, and 
the Pyramid, attain to the elevation of nearly 10,000 feet above sea- 
level. Maling’s Pass is about eight miles above the outlet of Lake Guyon, 
and leads to Lake Tennyson, a very beautiful sheet of water now occupying 
the bed of a great glacier, which formerly descended from the skirts of the 
Princess Mountain. This lake receives the head waters of the Clarence 
River. From the eastern side of the lake the track lies over a low saddle 
to the head of the Wairau, the river which, after passing close to the town 
of Blenheim, flows into Cloudy Bay. Between the northern side of the 
saddle and the Rainbow River, the Wairau runs for several miles through a 
narrow rocky gorge, on each side of which the mountains rise in steep and 
