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Updated: May 1, 2025
Soon after we started the rain ceased, and the clouds slowly uplifted themselves from the mountain sides. We were riding through the valley that leads from the Ashburton to the upper valley of the Rangitata, and kept on the right-hand side of it.
Perhaps I have thus been better able to describe the nature of the travelling than by any other. If one can get anything that can be manufactured into a feature and be dignified with a name once in five or six miles, one is very lucky. Well, we had followed these directions for some way, as far in fact as the terrace, when, the river coming into full view, I saw that the Rangitata was very high.
A river such as the Cam or Ouse would be far more difficult to cross without bridges than the Rakaia or Rangitata, notwithstanding their volume and rapidity; the former are deep in mud, and rarely have convenient places at which to get in or out; while the latter abound in them, and have a stony bed on which the wheels of your dray make no impression.
We looked onto the south: there was a slight haze over the great Ellesmere Lake, the water of which is quite fresh, though only separated from the sea by a slight bar of sand; the high banks of the Rakaia made a deep dark line extending right back into the mountains, and beyond it we could see the Rangitata faintly gleaming in the distance; between us and the coast were green patches and tiny homesteads, but still few and far between; close under our feet, and looking like a thread beneath the shadow of the mountain, ran the Selwyn in a narrow gorge, and on its bank stood the shepherd's hut that I have told you once afforded us such a good luncheon; it looked a mere toy, as if it came out of a child's box of playthings, and yet so snug for all its lonely position.
He could not have spent much time in eating, for there was wonderfully little besides flour, tea, and sugar for him to eat. There was no grog upon the establishment, so he could not have been drinking. He had distinctly seen my ghost two nights before. I had been coherently drowned in the Rangitata; and when he heard us coo-eying he was almost certain that it was the ghost again.
Give a map showing the geography of Erewhon in so far as the entrance into the country goes, and explain somewhere, if possible, about Butler's stones. Up as far as the top of the pass, where the statues are, keeps to the actual geography of the upper Rangitata district except that I have doubled the gorge.
There was nothing for it but to make the best of it, so we had tea, and fried some of the beef the smell of which was anything but agreeable, for it had been lying ten days on the ground on the other side the Rangitata, and was, to say the least, somewhat high and then we sat in our great-coats on four stones round the fire, and smoked; then I baked, and one of the cadets washed up; and then we arranged our blankets as best we could, and were soon asleep, alike unconscious of the dripping rain, which came through the roof of the hut, and of the cold, raw atmosphere which was insinuating itself through the numerous crevices of the thatch.
We are, however, sanguine that it may be a very useful little run, but shall have to see it through next winter before we can safely put sheep upon it. I have little to tell you concerning the Rangitata different from what I have already written about the Waimakiriri and the Harpur.
It was the most civilised experience I had had of up-country life since I left Highfield and was very enjoyable. I did not, however, remain very long at Mesopotamia at that time. There was a proposal on foot to improve the track leading from the Ashburton to the Rangitata on which some heavy cuttings were required to be made.
To the north we could see far into the upper gorge of the Rangitata, with its precipices and promontories receding point by point in bold outline to the towering peaks forty miles beyond, and below it the wide flats of the great river, with its broad bed and streams so rapid that they could not be frozen over.
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