THREE WEEKS IN WESTLAND

South Westland is a land apart from the rest of New Zealand—cut off by the mountains—an enchanted land, which if you once learn to know and love you never wish to leave, and when you do go away, you must always be wanting to return. It is a land of mountain and forest, of glacier and waterfall and rushing river, of blue sky and wide ocean. I first saw it in late autumn, when day after day the sun shone with steady radiance, warming you through and through as if it were still summer; bell-birds and tuis called to one another in the trees, and merry fantails darted hither and thither in the sun, catching sandflies, and spreading out their tails of brown or black-and-white stripes, like miniature fans. The district has a yearly rainfall of over a hundred inches, and to this owes the extreme luxuriance of its forests and the beauty of its many streams. It is a different world from the Alpine region on the east, where the mountains are grand with a grandeur of snowy summit and bare brown rock, and trees are few and stunted. In Westland you see the same peaks of snow, but they rise behind ranges clad in stately forests, shrouded often in mysterious violet tints; the glaciers which fall steeply down the mountain sides are bordered by tall trees; in summer the crimson rata blooms against the snow, and in May little white orchids were in flower only a few feet from the ice.

I went to Waiho Gorge intending to spend a week there, but stayed for three, and the following year I returned and remained for two months. The hotel stands in a cleared space in the forest, on a gentle slope overlooking the Waiho river valley—a wide flat with grass and trees. The Franz Josef Glacier is three miles away, and the road to it is no rough and stony track, but a moss-grown path through bush of more than usual loveliness. Here the sunlight, filtering through interlacing branches, shines on great cushions of green moss, on the rich green fronds of many crape ferns with curling feathery tips, and everywhere soil and tree-stems alike are clothed with ferns, lichens, liverworts and mosses in bewildering profusion and most satisfying beauty.

The Franz Josef Glacier is three-quarters of a mile wide and eight miles long, and flows to within six hundred feet of sea level, it is fed by another smaller glacier, and by vast snowfields lying among the mountains at its head. Its bed is far steeper than the Tasman, and the rate of flow much quicker, so the surface changes continually, and is broken up into the most extraordinary ridges and pinnacles of every conceivable shape and size; the pinnacles stand up like great teeth of ice, crevasses vary in depth from ten feet to a hundred, and the narrow ridges between are often cut short by other crevasses at right angles, making climbing among them tedious and difficult. A few years ago a hanging gallery of wooden steps on iron staples was erected in the hillside near the terminal face, forty feet above the level of the glacier; within six months the glacier rose up in a gigantic ice-wave and tore down the gallery like a child's toy; it then began to subside, and, when I saw it, was almost at its former level; but the gallery has not been replaced, and a few tattered planks still hang from the cliff.

The Franz Josef is almost free from moraine, though there are a few grey rocks and stones and coarse silt scattered about on the ice above the terminal face, which in the centre of the glacier is a sheer ice-wall, two hundred feet high. The Waiho River rises here, in an amphitheatre of blue and white ice, sometimes at one point, sometimes at another; great blocks of ice are constantly breaking away at the snout, and the river escapes wherever it can force its way. The ice of the Franz Josef has the most beautiful colouring; there are caves of clearest crystal, or of white ice faintly tinged with blue, and many moulins and ice-bridges of an intense, bright blue. From Waiho, the Franz Josef forms the nearest highway across the Alps into Canterbury—a long climb up the glacier and over the snowy saddle at its head, then down the steep slope of another glacier to the Tasman.

On my first visit, under the careful guidance of a Westland guide whose home is at Waiho, and who knows and loves the glacier and mountains as his intimate friends, I explored the lower slopes of the Franz Josef. We went together as far up the glacier as a hut which had just been built, three hours' climb from the terminal face.

At this point a rocky mountain spur juts out into the glacier—Cape Defiance it is aptly named—and on this spur, some few hundred feet above the glacier, a little platform has been levelled, and a hut of wood and iron put up. It is like the hut by the Hooker Glacier on the other side of the Alps, and is divided by a wooden partition into two rooms, with six bunks in each room, but instead of an oil stove, the Cape Defiance Hut has an open fireplace made of flat grey stones from the mountain side. The hut is perfectly fitted together; and every strip of corrugated iron and wood used in it has been carried on men's backs up the glacier in loads of fifty to sixty pounds—there is no other way, and the two men who did it all needed to be mountaineers as well as carpenters.

This hut was put up at Government expense, it is provisioned and kept going by private enterprise, and the guiding in Westland is in private hands.

Round the hut grow ferns and a bushy tangle of ribbon-wood, broom and coprosma trees, and from its windows you look up towards the head of the glacier or across to the mountains on the opposite side, and on the far side of a small tributary glacier behind Cape Defiance, you hear a waterfall thundering down from a height of a thousand feet. The first winter snow had fallen and the whole glacier was covered with fresh snow, making walking easier over the slippery ice, but as we climbed higher the snow was deeper—almost up to my knees—and when after sunset we reached the hut, we found it half-buried in snow, with snow-drifts two or three feet deep all round it.

The snow was speedily shovelled away, and a cheerful log fire soon blazed on the open hearth.

At eight o'clock that night the moon rose, full and brilliant, and from the door of the hut we saw glacier and mountains distinct in the moonlight: at our feet the full width of the glacier, its uneven edges stretching upwards to a great ice-fall of white and towering pinnacles, its lower slopes vanishing into the night: meeting the snow of the glacier was the fresh white snow of the mountains rising from it—an unbroken expanse of snow low down, but above a mingling of brown rock and whiteness against the blue sky, and the blue was a deep violet shade, changing to sapphire where the clear moon shone serenely. Very few stars were visible, but one planet gleamed like a lamp over the crest of the mountain opposite, and above our heads shone the Southern Cross—the five stars of the cross guarded by two bright pointers, shining even more brilliantly than the Cross itself—while over the glacier, behind the topmost pinnacles, floated a few soft, white, fleecy clouds.

I was the first lady to sleep in the Cape Defiance Hut, and found my bunk most comfortable with mattress and blankets, and for pillow, a spare blanket slipped inside a pillow-slip. I was offered a hot water bottle, but declined that, and though water in my room froze during the night, I was perfectly warm.

Next morning before I got up my guide brought me a cup of tea and a biscuit, then hot water in a billy for me to wash in. For breakfast I had a poached egg served on hot buttered toast, and cups of delicious coffee—and all these luxuries on the edge of a glacier!

The snow was too deep for us to go higher on the glacier, so we climbed a short way up the mountain behind the hut, where we found a convenient bare patch, sheltered by an overhanging rock, and could sit down on the rucksack and study the view.

We were only two thousand feet above sea level, and there in front of us was the Tasman Sea, its irregular coastline sixteen miles distant; the sea was a smooth grey, backed by level grey and yellow clouds—a quiet, lonely sea, and on its surface no faintest trace of fishing boat or steamer.

Just within the coastline glimmered the waters of a peaceful lagoon, and to the right, among the trees, shone a large lake, the surface ruffled by wind, which gave the effect of a fringe of snow on the far side. Between the foot of the glacier and the sea flowed the Waiho River, blue amid the pearly shingle of its wide bed. There is flat land sparsely covered with rough grass and shrub on both sides of the Waiho, then between river and sea stretch ridge behind ridge of low bush-covered hills, the furthest jutting out steeply into the ocean.

Beyond the glacier, on the opposite side to where we sat, lies a long level ridge, densely clothed with forest trees, and over them lay the snow gradually melting in the hot sun. Behind the wooded range are higher mountains, and at right angles to them, covering the lower levels, are miles of forest, deep green at first, paling through greens and greys to dimmest grey, where the line of forest meets the dim, grey sea.

Looking up the glacier, we could see two rocky peaks which stand some miles above the head, but not the actual head of the glacier, or the snowfield which feeds it. As we saw it that morning the Franz Josef was one magnificent ice-fall—the topmost ridge of huge ice-crags sharply outlined against the blue, and then a steep descent of rough broken ice, and over all a spotless mantle of snow, white and glistening in the sunshine: mountain and glacier and snow-sprinkled forests combined to make one glorious scene of wintry splendour.

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Back to the hut for an early lunch, after which we washed plates and cups, swept the floor, folded up the blankets, sorted out the provisions, put out the fire with a sprinkling of snow, and with key in the lock outside, we left the hut to its winter solitude.

Twenty miles from the Franz Josef Glacier is another, the Fox, which is eleven miles long, and this too, like the Franz Josef, comes down among the forest and ends in a winding river.

To reach the Fox glacier, I rode on horseback through the bush, down the "Main South Road"—such a pretty road—worn bare in places by waggons and horses' feet, but for the most part soft with grass and moss, with grassy margins bordering the forest. After about eight miles, the road becomes a mere track, steep and often stony, and across it are cut shallow water-courses, lined with stones and the stems of tree-ferns; the whole road is continually being improved and widened, and in a few years settlers will be able to drive a carriage where they must now either ride or walk. At intervals by the side of the track are huts, usually of corrugated iron: one was of logs roofed with shingles, and one of fern stems, and along a section on which several men were working, we saw tents of canvas or white calico. The permanent iron huts are put up at Government expense, for the use primarily of surveyors, gold prospectors or roadmen, but any traveller is at liberty to light a fire and spend the night in one of them. At one such hut, standing in a grass paddock, fenced in with barbed wire, we dismounted, turned the horses loose to feed and walked in: it was a small, one-roomed hut, and had four wooden bunks stocked with straw and bracken for bedding, a wide open fireplace, and two wooden benches. We soon had a good fire of dry logs, and when the billy boiled we made tea, and ate our lunch in the sunny paddock, surrounded by bush-covered hills and the remoteness of the forest world.

The aloofness of the "back blocks" is amazing, so vast and yet so friendly; in the forest itself you have only the birds for company, and they are all fearless and trustful, and unsuspecting of any danger from stick or gun: sometimes near a homestead you see cows or sheep grazing by tracks or river-beds, but the only native four-footed animals in all New Zealand are two varieties of bats, and its forests have no snakes or hurtful creatures of any kind. The people, too, who live among the Westland forests, share in the friendliness of the forest birds; even alone on a bush track at night, I always felt quite sure that if I did meet anyone—roadman or surveyor—he would simply be very glad to see me and would do anything in his power to help me.

The Main South Road goes up three steep hills and down into the valleys between, over rivers and creeks, and always it is a forest road, and we looked through brown trunks and twining lianes and waving fern-fronds upon trees of every shade of green, down in the valleys and up the hillsides, and often some glorious snowy peak crowning the forest. Wherever the hill has been cut away in making the track the once bare soil is covered with ferns and mosses. We rode by walls of green flecked with red, where long glossy ferns and trailing festons of lycopodiums, all copper and green, stretched out to touch us as we passed; and down the cliffs tumbled sparkling waterfalls to join the brawling streams below. At sunset, we came to the brow of a long steep hill, overlooking a wide fertile plain—two silvery rivers winding through it; in the distance low bush-hills, and over them as the sun went down, a pink haze, through which the dark trees showed as through a filmy transparency, in front of a clear sky, blue tinged with green.

At Weheka, the homestead where we stayed, I learnt a little about life in remote places: here we were eighty-seven miles from train or doctor, but always, through the telephone, in touch with the world outside. When anyone is ill, the doctor is rung up at Ross or Hokitika, and symptoms are described, and remedies are sent by the next mail—a doctor's visit costs forty or fifty pounds, and in case of emergency each settler must be his own doctor. For children in these country districts Government provides "household schools," allowing £6 a head per annum for three or more children of school age, and a teacher is sent from the nearest school, or sometimes the mother of the children is the teacher; when there are as many as seven children to be taught, a schoolroom is built for them near the homestead, and desks and maps are provided.

Round Weheka a good deal of land has been cleared and sown with grass, and our host was shortly sending two hundred bullocks to the market at Hokitika, over a hundred miles away.

This farmhouse grows every year more modern and up-to-date. The original homestead was a small one-roomed hut planted in the forest.

The present house is roomy and comfortable, with large sitting-room and many bedrooms, the kitchen is a big room apart from the rest, and yet another building is the bathroom, in which is a large bath and a cold water tap, and near all the rest is the Government school. When I first stayed at Weheka, music was provided by an excellent gramophone, but the following year I found a new piano, and one daughter was learning to play the piano, and another the violin.

At first the house was lighted by oil lamps and candles, now electric light has been installed, and an electric globe greets you at the garden-gate. There is only one other house near the homestead, but the Main South Road goes on bravely for thirteen miles to the next house, and beyond that to another settlement fifty miles further south.

The day following my arrival at Weheka, I was taken on the Fox Glacier.

Compared with the Franz Josef the Fox Glacier carries a quantity of moraine, the terminal face slopes gently down to the valley, and above it are boulders and stones, of every size; many of them are covered with bright red lichen, which makes them look as though they had been sprinkled with brick-dust. The lower ice is in smooth layers, and when you have safely crossed the tempestuous Fox River and scrambled over the loose rubble of the moraine, walking on the glacier itself presents no difficulty.

At one time this glacier stood at a far higher level, and one high rock-face has deep grooves worn in it by the stones carried down in distant ages. Under the rock with its deep grooves, the ice has been forced into huge curves through the variation in its rate of flow: the centre of the glacier moves most quickly, and the ice at the edge has been left behind and wedged against the mountain side: in its efforts to move on, the ice river has become twisted into the strangest contortions, and you can trace cause and effect with unmistakeable clearness.

From a point only a mile up we had a splendid view towards the head of the glacier. Ridges of rock and snow stand above it, and on their right is one tall white peak, beyond which the glacier rises and curves round in a sweeping ice-fall of pinnacles, all jagged white ice shot with green. Looking back down the valley, we saw the sea lying in grey streaks on the distant horizon.

Forest and ice meet at the glacier's edge; we boiled ice-water in the billy, and sat on a grey pebbly beach, under the shelter of a big tree-veronica.

The day had been grey and gloomy, but at sunset, as we left the glacier, the sun shone out, first lighting up the yellow autumn leaves of the fuchsia trees as from the glow of a fiery furnace, then flooding all the forest with golden light, so that for a few minutes all the bush was turned to gold, with the glacier behind part white and part grey shadow, until the sun sank below the horizon, and all was grey.