The World Begins To Feel Very Small When One Finds One Can Get Half
Round It In Three Months; And One Mentally Determines To Visit All These
Places Before Coming Back Again, Not To Mention A Good Many More.
I search my diary in vain to find some pretermitted adventure wherewith
to give you a thrill, or, as good Mrs. B. calls it, "a feel"; but I can
find none.
The mail is going; I will write again by the next.
CHAPTER III
Aspect of Port Lyttelton - Ascent of Hill behind it - View - Christ Church-
-Yankeeisms - Return to Port Lyttelton and Ship - Phormium Tenax - Visit to
a Farm - Moa Bones.
January 27, 1860. - Oh, the heat! the clear transparent atmosphere, and
the dust! How shall I describe everything - the little townlet, for I
cannot call it town, nestling beneath the bare hills that we had been
looking at so longingly all the morning - the scattered wooden boxes of
houses, with ragged roods of scrubby ground between them - the tussocks
of brown grass - the huge wide-leafed flax, with its now seedy stem,
sometimes 15 or 16 feet high, luxuriant and tropical-looking - the
healthy clear-complexioned men, shaggy-bearded, rowdy-hatted, and
independent, pictures of rude health and strength - the stores, supplying
all heterogeneous commodities - the mountains, rising right behind the
harbour to a height of over a thousand feet - the varied outline of the
harbour now smooth and sleeping. Ah me! pleasant sight and fresh to
sea-stricken eyes. The hot air, too, was very welcome after our long
chill.
We dined at the table d'hote at the Mitre - so foreign and yet so
English - the windows open to the ground, looking upon the lovely
harbour. Hither come more of the shaggy clear-complexioned men with the
rowdy hats; looked at them with awe and befitting respect. Much grieved
to find beer sixpence a glass. This was indeed serious, and was one of
the first intimations which we received that we were in a land where
money flies like wild-fire.
After dinner I and another commenced the ascent of the hill between port
and Christ Church. We had not gone far before we put our knapsacks on
the back of the pack-horse that goes over the hill every day (poor pack-
horse!). It is indeed an awful pull up that hill; yet we were so
anxious to see what was on the other side of it that we scarcely noticed
the fatigue: I thought it very beautiful. It is volcanic, brown, and
dry; large intervals of crumbling soil, and then a stiff, wiry,
uncompromising-looking tussock of the very hardest grass; then perhaps a
flax bush, or, as we should have said, a flax plant; then more crumbly,
brown, dry soil, mixed with fine but dried grass, and then more
tussocks; volcanic rock everywhere cropping out, sometimes red and
tolerably soft, sometimes black and abominably hard. There was a great
deal, too, of a very uncomfortable prickly shrub, which they call
Irishman, and which I do not like the look of at all.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 17 of 87
Words from 8364 to 8879
of 45285
