Chap. XII. THE MANAWATU- JACK BUFF. 357 
customary " Remain in tliy place ! " and jumped into 
tlie boat. The Haere ki tai ! " Go to the tide ! " re- 
turned the civility. 
While Lewis went, with his native wife and two lads 
as attendants, to fetch the pigs, Geordie Young and I 
borrowed the whale-boat of an English trader, who ar- 
rived from an expedition up the river soon after us, and 
proceeded to sound the entrance. A very smooth day 
favoured our attempt. A long sand-spit stretches to 
north-west, about a mile from the south point of the 
mouth. A shorter bank on the north side leaves a nar- 
row passage between the two, and at the extreme end 
of this we found six feet at low-water. The soundings 
then deepened, inwards, to two and a half fathoms be- 
tween the two dry points. The day being fine, the cone 
of Mount Egmont appeared exactly between the two 
spits. Over the level tract of country nearly due north 
appeared Tonga Riro ; and the top of a range of dis- 
tant mountains tipped with snow, called Rua Hine by 
the natives, bounded the horizon between that and the 
east. In that direction a gorge exists, between the 
southern end of the Rua Hine and the low north-east- 
ern extremity of the Tararua range, which I imagined to 
communicate with the country towards Hawke's Bay. 
This conjecture was confirmed by the narrative 
which Jack DujBf, the trader, gave us of his journey. 
He had ascended the river as far as a whale-boat could 
go (about fifty miles, according to his calculation, from 
the mouth), through country of the same level and fer- 
tile character, and abounding with the finest timber. 
Having obtained a canoe and native guides, he pro- 
ceeded two or three days' journey higher up, over nu- 
merous rapids and shallows, and through a gorge 
where the river formed a cataract between the cliffy 
extremities of the two mountain ranges. He described 
