154 Bird-Song : and New Zealand Song Birds 
the first two notes only; or the first five; if only the first two 
the second was lengthened to a crotchet. On one occasion beino> 
immediately below the bird when the two notes were sung X 
repeatedly heard the light notes of (13) following the others, 
which were bell-tones. Somewhat similar in character was the 
swinging theme of (14), heard on Kapiti in 1917. The first 
two notes were clearer in sound than the two following, and the 
theme, occupying two seconds, was repeated over and over. The 
notes w r ere sung in an obscure deathly vale, whose entrance, an 
apparently dry water-course, was piled with angular rocks and 
fallen dead trees, amongst nettles, struggling ferns, bracken, and 
a fev r clumps of graceful-plumed toetoe. The water-course, 
overshadowed with karaka, kohekohe, and daisy-tree, was steep 
and tortuous, and at its first bend stood a clump of ponga, the 
beautiful silver tree-fern. Once the gorge-like vale was entered, 
it opened out. Its bed was cumbered with great confused masses 
of savage rock, angular, unmossed, and unlichened, strewn with 
dead trees in all stages of decay, fallen, grappling with the rock, 
from the steep sides, which w r ere gashed and scored wfith 
treacherous rock-slides coming from raggedly-cusped guts above. 
Trees, some of huge size, still clung to the steep slopes, their roots 
twisting and intertwining, sometimes in the air vainly, sometimes 
hardily in rock crevices; many leaned ominously; many w 7 ere 
already partly wrenched from their precarious hold. It seemed 
the forbidden entrance to a forbidden land; a Dantesque 
region; and the way was barred by a sheer rocky bluff that rose 
across the gorge. Down this rock trickled thin streams of w 7 ater 
over the black gleaming surface, into a shallow pool at the foot, 
