A CANOE ON THE WANGANUI RIVER.
you please walk P This lapid bad," said Rangi. He was not a Chinese, but a full-blooded Maori, very apt to confuse with the r he had known all his life the European I only lately acquired ; and the rapid he spoke of occurs about sixty miles up the Wanganui River in New Zealand (Wah-ngah-n6o-ee, you pronounce it, and the word means "great inlet "). Its long, downhill rush of broken criss-cross wavelets certainly did look rather bad, and the passenger accordingly took a short-cut inland across the bend, and presently came down to the water's edge again, above the rapid. The scene was characteristic. In the foreground flowed the curving river, two hundred yards perhaps in width, and in colour a greyish green ; to right and left it twisted about the bases of forested hills, and disappeared ; while from its opposite margin rose more hills, one behind another and all thickly clothed with the beautiful virgin " bush," which is really forest. High up, the soft white mists of morning still floated among the dark pines and rake, but, just across the water, a potato- patch showed bright green in the sun, and a streamer of blue smoke went wavering up across the forest from a little kainga (village) of low grey roofs. It was only a very little kainga, for, alas ! the genial and gentle natives of the Wanganui have dwindled sadly in number of late years; but it looked picturesque and it seemed prosperous. A tall poplar, like an
upward-pointing finger, rose beside the wharepuni—the general sitting-room and sleeping-chamber—whose long, brown, barn- like sides, again, looked new and clean; there were one or two good canoes drawn up on the little Bandy beach ; quince-trees full of bright gold fruit surrounded the kainga, and on one side of it, like tutelary deities, stood two tree-ferns, some thirty feet high—graceful things like lovelier palm-trees, with slender stems and drooping crowns of great green fronds. Happy shouts in childish voices came from the neighbourhood of the cooking-fire, and the vagrant music of a cow-bell mingled with the murmur of the rapid.
But now came another sound, the sound of plashing paddles; and round the bend shot suddenly the long streak of the canoe. Sturdy, flat-nosed, of the Melanesian Maori type, Tame squatted on his heels at the bow, and with a short paddle dug vigorously into the water, while Rangi, true Polynesian, graceful, dignified, and no darker than many a Spaniard, sat in the stern, and used his rather longer paddle as a steer-oar. As for the canoe herself, she was a long, slender craft, thirty-five feet perhaps in length, and about four feet wide amidship, whence she tapered both fore and aft to very little indeed. A few European touches about her made for additional stability, but she was still a true wake— she had been hollowed native-fashion out of a single totara- tree.
Now came a period all too brief of delicious gliding move- ment; and then another rapid appeared, and the men exchanged their paddles for poles, and standing upright, proceeded to punt her up—a task requiring knowledge as well as much dexterity and considerable strength. We learn from the old people, Rangi answered, when asked how he knew what seemed the very intricate channel up the rapid; and both men kept interchanging directions in mellifluous Maori. There was sometimes no little excitement in the very near neighbourhood of all those little snapping, rushing. foaming waves, but probably never any danger, for the skill of the Wanganui boatman has been famous for generations. Rapids and reaches alternated with each other all that morning. Twice the canoe ran aground, and had to be walked bodily up the watery hill by her wading boatmen; while Ngaporo, "worst lapid on the river," had to be declined altogether, and the wake conducted upon an amphibious career along shore. But in the afternoon we came to a part of the river where there were practically no rapids, and the water Slowed, deep, full, and quiet, within high cliffs. And it was here that the real spell of the Wanganui fell upon us.
The Wanganui River has a course of about two hundred miles, mostly along an earthquake-riven channel, deep and narrow, through the heart of hilly and thickly wooded country. Steam launches navigate it for nearly three- quarters of its course, but really to see it the wiser way is to steam up-river as far as Pipiriki, and thence to explore by canoe the next twenty miles or so, which are by far the most beautiful of the whole river. Here, once the rapids are passed, your boatman propels his craft by punting her along offshore, inserting his pole-point here and there into one of the many little hollows that pit the only half-bard rock, a way of going that is almost noiseless and exquisitely pleasant. As you pass thus along the mosey cliff you can look up into the little white and purple faces of flowers, the green freshness of innumerable ferns, the hanging roots or overarching bough■ of the forest far above; you can pause before the mouth of dark, cool caves, hung with ferns and foliage, and peer at the white waterfalls dashing down from unseen glooms above; or catch, together with the spray of other little cascades that here and there rend the cliff from top to bottom, the moist, delicious fragrance of moss and earth and fern—that true breath of the bush. Or, again, you can look across at the opposite cliff and see it, all tapestried with green, stand sheer up out of the water for a hundred or two hundred feet, and then back off into many-folded hills, dark with noble trees or bright with tree-ferns. Tree-ferns are quite a feature of the Wanganui. Their green pavilions, spread sometimes for acres high on the hillside, look like peaceful but gay encamp- ments; their happy hue, breaking in upon the darkness of the tree-tops, makes one think, coming upon them on a dull day, that the sun has come suddenly out; in single specimens, stately at once and lovely, they give to the riverside a peculiarly touching grace, and paint it perennially through all autumns and winters with the fresh, glad colour of spring. Nor is other colour wanting. In September the grey mist of the drooping kowhai boughs breaks into long showers of golden bloom; in January the black rates burst into bloom, and stand like pyres of scarlet flame. And at all seasons delicate ferns and the parasitic kiekie, with its ribands of glancing green, neat in the branches, and leafy vines link and lace them together. Here and there some naked cliff of the pale clay-rock, buff or primrose or white, gleams out high up among the trees ; and every break in the branches shows the rock-face, shining with streams of green flax and glossy sword-grass. Then, too, from the wake you may make acquaintance with the innocent people of the bush—admire the dark-blue coat of the native kingfisher as he flies across the stream ; feel the little fly-catching fantail, the friend, the darling, come flirting with a chirrup almost next your cheek ; or watch the grey duck, disturbed in some watery nook by the advancing prow, whir away close to the water. A black shag flies overhead, neck outstretched ; can he, notorious angler that he is, extract from the river those fat trout no mere fishing-fly has ever been known to tempt ? A pigeon .zones heavily over from one far-off tree-fringe to the other, and lets you realize how deep the cliff-gorge is, how narrow its lane of air, and how remote the sky. Across the liquid forest street, the bell-birds call out to each other in long golden notes, and the mischievous tut mocks them. There may be a wild pig or so somewhere in the forest ; else there is nothing fierce so much as to think of—now that the day of the war-canoe is past. On the Zambezi, yonder brown protrusion from the water might be a hippo's head ; on the Ganges, that dark sprawling up the bank would mean crocodile; but, on the Wanganui, the one is nothing worse than a snag, the other only a log.
And then the pictures in the water Simply as water, the Wanganui is not so very beautiful; scarcely another river in New Zealand but for tint and transparency can outdo it easily. But as a surface it probably outdoes them all, and, by making itself the faithful mirror of beauty, has found out how to become beautiful. Every little fern and grass-blade on the bank ; every rock-coat of moss, gold-green, verdant or ruddy every long white line of waterfall, gleam and glint of bare cliff, outflung feather of foliage, statuesque tree-fern- there they are all living over again in the water. Nay, and the sheeny, satiny surface ie able to add a charm, too, of its own—the river-picture shines with a softness, gleams with a living lustre that the picture on the bank has not ; as the reflections of a quiet mind are often fairer than the realities which give rise to them. Where, again, the flow of the current is a little more evident, and the forms are slightly confused, the colour-effect is all the more delicious ; for then all these infinitely various tones of green and brown, sun-bright and shadowed, tremble together in a sort of multitudinous dream a sweet delirium, of ever-fugitive tints, and patterns at play.
Yet still, with all these charms, we have not named the nameless charm of the river. The wake glides, the birds flit and sing, the bush is beautiful, and through the very heart of it we steal our way upon a polished pavement of pictures. Bnt that is not all—that is not it. . . . You notice, after a while, how still you have been sitting; it occurs to you that nobody has spoken for some time; and then you try to remember of what you have been thinking, and you cannot remember, yet you know you have been deeply at rest. Through this her mood of ferns and mosses and silent, flowing water, into what sanctuary of life has Nature for a moment let us in, as through a hidden doorway ? Emerging, with a sigh, back into our own noisy and shallow being, we retain at least a conviction of profound, unnameable beauty, we are
sure that we have shared unalterable peace. B. E. B.
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