# Through South Westland/Part 1/Chapter 4

CHAPTER IV.
THE WAIHO GORGE AND A HATTER.
David McKeb Wright.
The harbour-master and I continued our way to a straggling little settlement at the foot of precipitous bush-clad hills, the outliers of the high ranges behind. Deep gorges with foaming torrents cleft them in all directions, and we drove across a flat where the road winds amid scrub and stones and yellow grasses, with the Waiho river eddying among its boulders on the right hand. As one proceeds, one of the finest, and perhaps one of the strangest, views in the world unfolds; for where else can we hope to find a combination of colour like this? The dark mountains rising purple to the snow, peak beyond peak of the Southern Alps soaring white against that wondrous blue—so close they seem, so attainable—it is hard to realize they are 10,000 feet above us. And between two mountain walls, filling a mighty gorge, winds down the Franz Josef glacier; an icy chaos of pinnacles and seracs, green-blue and glittering white against ​the purple-black crags of the gorge. But strangest of all is where the glacier and the forest meet, and the splendid scarlet of the ratas seems almost to touch the ice and snow. The forest itself, ringed with vivid green of tree-fern and a hundred subtropical plants, adds the last touch of vivid contrast. Rhododendrons against Himalayan snow may come to mind, but Himalayan landscapes are too vast . . . . . . This is South Westland, and nowhere else. We, who have seen it, want to compare it with nothing else. The glacier comes down to the very fringe of the tree-ferns and the ratas, to within 600 feet of sea level and ten miles of the sea—as the crow flies; and this in a climate moist and warm for the greater part of the year—a climate that favours the most varied production of rare and lovely ferns, astelias, and many a shrub and plant cultivated with utmost care at home. Was it any wonder that I gazed spellbound—trying to take it in, as the eye travelled over that marvellous picture?
There was a fine new hotel being built out on the flat, but we drove to the little old accommodation-house at the edge of the bush—a punga house, i.e., built of fern-logs on end, filled in with moss and grass. A house of this kind may even grow—for the ferns are very tenacious of life, and I have seen a fence where the posts were nearly all sending out spreading heads of beautiful fern.
That first afternoon we devoted to the inspection of the hot springs. It was indescribably weird to have a pool of boiling water close to a glacier! We went up along a torrent-bed, and in a clearing on the edge of the bush was a corrugated-iron hut, a simple sort of bath-house with a wooden trough ​sunk in the floor. A bench ran round the walls, and a small hand-pump brought up the evil-smelling water, at such a temperature one had to wait for it to cool before bathing. If the extreme potency of the smell were any gauge for the potency of the water-cure, there ought to be a hydro here—never have I smelt anything so horrid. Transome preferred to bathe in the hot pool outside, taking a cold douche in the torrent after, and certainly all traces of fatigue vanished like magic, and we agreed it was a wonderful spring. There was a rugged path climbing up the steep hill behind, and here we came on the Eremite, who dwelt like the dryad of this strange place.
I crossed the gorge by a bridge suspended high in air, just two planks with wires on both sides—a slip, and there would have been no more wandering! Far beneath, the Waiho churned and boiled in yellow foam, and the bridge swayed alarmingly. On the other side was a bit of road leading past a trim cottage with green doors and windows, and a garden gay with flowers. The forest shut it in, and the grim walls of the Waiho gorge rose behind, and in the pleasant living-room I sat and chatted long; heard tales of the five stalwart sons, and of the grandchildren, of the diggers in the gorge, and the Hatters among the hills. The mountains and the forest and the great glacier are, to the old lady who lives there under shadow of the everlasting hills, “The wonderful works of God: Can we have anything but good when we live so close to the grand works of our Father?” And to her the Church Service every other month is, “The oasis in the desert of our lives, where we can drink of the Water of Life.” We never met again, but we seemed to have known each other always.
“A great grey chaos—a land half-made. Where endless space is, and no life stirreth; And the soul of a man will recoil afraid From the sphinx-like visage that Nature weareth.”
Far up in the mist near the glacier the men were calling and halloa-ing, but we had wandered so far now, they could not see us in the waning light. We strayed through this nightmare of a place—it was impossible we could miss two men and a hut, and spend the night among the stones, yet it began to look like it!