# Through South Westland/Part 1/Chapter 8

CHAPTER VIII.
THE LAST STAGE.
The glory from the Western hills
Falls fading, spark on spark,
Only a mighty sadness fills
The spaces of the dark.
G. C. Whitney.
The mist floating in the valley was very tantalizing, hiding so much I longed to see. The scene was changing entirely. We were now riding up a wide river-bed of grey sands and gravel; crossing and re-crossing, but never swimming. Then the gorge opened into a wide valley, stretching away on our left, to high snow mountains, and unexplored peaks and glaciers. The Lansborough river comes down here, bringing the main body of water to the Haast, and it is said it was due to a mistake that the small river entering it on the right was named after Sir Julius Von Haast. He was the first to penetrate through these mountains from sea to sea. It is getting a long time ago now, but I don’t think the track can have changed much since the day when he and his men forced their way through!
As we entered the Upper Haast the sun broke through completely. Looking back, we saw the snow-fields of the Lansborough glittering against the glorious blue, with a dark mass of precipitous mountains at the junction of the valleys. No longer was the Haast a hungry, treacherous river. Here it was a lovely blue stream, widening in places to broad reaches of quiet water, where the paradise ducks swam with their almost grown-up families, uttering their plaintive cry and rising and flying short distances as we disturbed them. It is a cry in keeping with the loneliness of Nature among these untrodden hills. Before us stretched a fair green lawn—so smooth it seemed almost as if it had been cut—surrounded no longer by the western bush. Here grew the first outliers of the beech forests of the eastern slopes. The dense jungle​growth was no more, and other signs began to show themselves. Instead of cantering over that smooth, green lawn, we had to go very carefully. It was riddled with rabbit-holes. The rabbits were there in hundreds, popping about—grey, yellow, and black, and with them a colony of English starlings.
After I got back I sent a parcel of books and magazines as a contribution to the library; but I never heard if it reached its destination The “boss” invited us to go down into the Wills ​River gorge to see the falls. Here the whole volume of the river plunges between narrow, rock walls—a glorious melée of tumbling foam and bright green water. Everything was drenched with spray, and the climb back over slippery rock through wet creepers and ferns was hard work. And then we said good-bye to these last Westland friends, and started on the final stage. That night we would go to bed in the ordinary way, in ordinary beds, having probably dined off excellent Otago mutton. I am afraid no real gratitude was in my heart for these mercies. The surveyor sleeping happily in the bush: the schoolmaster teaching those few lambs in the wilderness: my friends among the settlers’ wives . . . . all had helped to spoil me for the return to the routine of daily life.
Alas, I viewed it with no feeling of exultation! It was only by the promise we should come again and complete that unfinished stage of the Main South Road that Transome roused me to any feeling of satisfaction. I let the others go on with the horses down the steep descent, preferring to walk. But the track was hot and dry, and the yellow clay along the sides, was cracked with heat. Under the beeches was but “a ragged penury of shade”; their little evergreen leaves looked so parched and leathery after the cool, damp forest, and I was glad to get down to the horses waiting at the ford.
Not thus had I walked down many a descent in Westland—where the great trees made a shadowy tunnel, and waters sprayed one from among the ferns. We cantered fast over stretches of grass by the river till we came to a real road. Then the hills fell back, and the forest gradually came to ​an end. Sheep pasture took its place with cornfields and hay fields along the wide valley. There were English trees now clustering round little homesteads, and a sunny stretch of country ended at a turquoise-blue line. There lay Lake Wanaka, closed all round by bare mountains which rose in broken peaks and rugged outlines to the south. Verily a different world. The horses seemed to like the change and cantered fast.
Ted would have liked to show the superiority of his mare, and we raced for a stretch, but it was not fair to the horses after their long climb. We drew rein and very soberly we arrived at the Widow Pipson’s. She was standing under the verandah of a little house set in the midst of a field of waving grass; and whether she expected us or not, I don’t know—there had been no one to tell her—but she evinced no surprise, and took me into a sweet little room, supplying all my wants. When I joined the others we sat down to a most appetizing meal. I remember there were chops, and I remember, too, Ted continuing his care of my wants—under all circumstances he was the same competent, commanding person; he ought to have been a commissariat officer or a field-marshal.
Afterwards we stood outside in the warm, still air, watching the setting sun colour the bare mountains hemming in the valley—first blue, then gold, then pink, and lastly grey; and when the hush of evening came with the dusk, we went ​inside to write our long-delayed letters and diaries, and “so to bed.”
And though next day was not really to be our last—for we had seven more days’ travelling—yet to me it was the end, and when we said good-bye to Ted, it was good-bye to Westland and all it had come to mean to me.
Of Wanaka, among its blue mountains, I will not write; or of that long day riding round the base of the rugged hills that enclose Hawea, where the storms chased each other, lashing the steel-blue waters into foam. Or of the golden evening that followed, when we crossed the Hawea plain and saw the harvesters in blue dungarees binding the yellow corn; or of straight roads leading to little homesteads, dotted about in their formal fir plantations, all rather parched and dusty and bounded by sun-baked hills. I saw it all with a sick longing for the cool dim forest, for the ever-murmuring waters, for the sights and sounds I had learned to love:
“Lost is the sense of noiseless, sweet escape From dust of stony plains, from sun and gale, When the feet tread where shade and silence drape The stems with peace beneath the leafy veil, Or when a pleasant rustling stirs each shape Creeping with whisperings that rise and fail Through labyrinths half-lit by chequered play Of light on golden moss now burned away.!”
I had entered the promised land. I had seen a world as it was before man came there; in after years it could never be quite the same again. For if I went back to it, I might not find the Fairy Land of my dreams. The forest world must ​give place before the fire and the axe, but the memory of it, as I saw it in my brief sojourn, can never pass away.
So, as the sun sank behind the purple barrier of the western mountains, out-lining their edges in gold: and their long shadows stretched across the plain: and the harvesters came back in the gloaming: I said. Farewell.