Many Makeshifts Are
Necessary; A Broken Rail Or Gate Is Mended With A Piece Of Flax, So,
Occasionally, Are The Roads.
I have seen the Government roads
themselves being repaired with no other material than stiff tussocks of
grass, flax, and rushes:
This is bad, but to a certain extent
necessary, where there is so much to be done and so few hands and so
little money with which to do it.
After getting off the completed portion of the road, the track commences
along the plains unassisted by the hand of man. Before one, and behind
one, and on either hand, waves the yellow tussock upon the stony plain,
interminably monotonous. On the left, as you go southward, lies Banks
Peninsula, a system of submarine volcanoes culminating in a flattened
dome, little more than 3000 feet high. Cook called it Banks Island,
either because it was an island in his day, or because no one, to look
at it, would imagine that it was anything else. Most probably the
latter is the true reason; though, as the land is being raised by
earthquakes, it is just possible that the peninsula may have been an
island in Cook's days, for the foot of the peninsula is very little
above the sea-level. It is indeed true that the harbour of Wellington
has been raised some feet since the foundation of the settlement, but
the opinion here is general that it must have been many centuries since
the peninsula was an island.
On the right, at a considerable distance, rises the long range of
mountains which the inhabitants of Christ Church suppose to be the
backbone of the island, and which they call the Snowy Range. The real
axis of the island, however, lies much farther back, and between it and
the range now in sight the land has no rest, but is continually steep up
and steep down, as if Nature had determined to try how much mountain she
could place upon a given space; she had, however, still some regard for
utility, for the mountains are rarely precipitous - very steep, often
rocky and shingly when they have attained a great elevation, but seldom,
if ever, until in immediate proximity to the West Coast range, abrupt
like the descent from the top of Snowdon towards Capel Curig or the
precipices of Clogwyn du'r arddu. The great range is truly Alpine, and
the front range occasionally reaches an altitude of nearly 7000 feet.
The result of this absence of precipice is, that there are no waterfalls
in the front ranges and few in the back, and these few very
insignificant as regards the volume of the water. In Switzerland one
has the falls of the Rhine, of the Aar, the Giesbach, the Staubbach, and
cataracts great and small innumerable; here there is nothing of the
kind, quite as many large rivers, but few waterfalls, to make up for
which the rivers run with an almost incredible fall. Mount Peel is
twenty-five miles from the sea, and the river-bed of the Rangitata
underneath that mountain is 800 feet above the sea line, the river
running in a straight course though winding about in its wasteful river-
bed. To all appearance it is running through a level plain. Of the
remarkable gorges through which each river finds its way out of the
mountains into the plains I must speak when I take my dray through the
gorge of the Ashburton, though this is the least remarkable of them all;
in the meantime I must return to the dray on its way to Main's, although
I see another digression awaiting me as soon as I have got it two miles
ahead of its present position.
It is tedious work keeping constant company with the bullocks; they
travel so slowly. Let us linger behind and sun ourselves upon a tussock
or a flax bush, and let them travel on until we catch them up again.
They are now going down into an old river-bed formerly tenanted by the
Waimakiriri, which then flowed into Lake Ellesmere, ten or a dozen miles
south of Christ Church, and which now enters the sea at Kaiapoi, twelve
miles north of it; besides this old channel, it has others which it has
discarded with fickle caprice for the one in which it happens to be
flowing at present, and which there appears some reason for thinking it
is soon going to tire of. If it eats about a hundred yards more of its
gravelly bank in one place, the river will find an old bed several feet
lower than its present; this bed will conduct it into Christ Church.
Government had put up a wooden defence, at a cost of something like 2000
pounds, but there was no getting any firm starting-ground, and a few
freshes carried embankment, piles, and all away, and ate a large slice
off the bank into the bargain; there is nothing for it but to let the
river have its own way. Every fresh changes every ford, and to a
certain extent alters every channel; after any fresh the river may shift
its course directly on to the opposite side of its bed, and leave Christ
Church in undisturbed security for centuries; or, again, any fresh may
render such a shift in the highest degree improbable, and sooner or
later seal the fate of our metropolis. At present no one troubles his
head much about it, although a few years ago there was a regular panic
upon the subject.
These old river channels, or at any rate channels where portions of the
rivers have at one time come down, are everywhere about the plains, but
the nearer you get to a river the more you see of them; on either side
the Rakaia, after it has got clear of the gorge, you find channel after
channel, now completely grassed over for some miles, betraying the
action of river water as plainly as possible.
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