490 
present limits. I shall here follow the footsteps of my friend 
Dr. Haast, who, in 1861 , undertook the task of exploring the 
headwaters of the river Rangitata, and on that occasion first exa- 
mined and described the beautiful glaciers of the New Zealand Alps. 
In ascending the Canterbury plains along the course of the 
Rangitata we reach near the gorge of the Rangitata the place, 
where the river enters the mountains, or, properly speaking, issues 
from the ranges and enters the plains by a deep rocky gorge about 
260 feet deep. On the other side of the gorge the river-bed widens 
into a basin-like valley, several miles broad and about twenty miles 
long. The sides of the valley rise with steep walls, whilst the 
bottom is filled to a depth of more than 1000 feet with immense 
masses of boulders and sand, into which the river has excavated its 
channel by terraces. The re- 
gularity and the great number 
of those terraces — in some 
places as much as twenty-eight 
have been counted — is truly 
astonishing; and in fact, no 
Terraces in the Rangitata valley. 
O’ 
reater contrast can be con- 
ceived than the long horizontal lines of the terraces on the 
sides of the river-bed, their steps ascending the valleys with a gra- 
dient of 1 to 3 degress like broad, artificially laid out roads, and 
the broken outlines of the wild jagged rocky peaks above them. 
The river-bed itself has still , even here , the considerable breadth 
of one or two miles. The banks are covered partly with dense 
scrub, partly with Fagus forests, and partly with a growth, of grass 
and with the “spear-grass” of the settlers ( Aciphylla grandis Hook.). 
At the upper end of this deeply excavated valley, the terraces dis- 
appear gradually, and the river divides itself into two branches, 
the Havelock and the Clyde. At the junction of the Clyde with 
the Havelock, the bed of the river lies about 2200 feet above the 
level of the sea. The broad valley of the Rangitata is here divided 
into two narrow defiles running higher and higher to the flanks 
of mountains covered with perpetual snow and ice, and bear in 
