Chapter III.

ROUND THE SUGARLOAF.

“THE CREST OF THE RAINBOW.”

The saying that the best place to see the mountains is from below, not from their summits, may properly be qualified in its application to our Port Hills by the opinion that the finest view of the craggy range of old volcanic upjuts is that to be had from a few hundred feet below the range crest, on the Lyttelton Harbour side. Really to appreciate the special and peculiar beauty of the hills, with their nippled peaks and crags and their age-weathered cliffs, one must travel along the Lyttelton-Governor’s Bay road rather than view the range from the Plains, where the smoothed and settled ridges, like a series of long whalebacks, give little hint of the sudden rocky wildness of the precipitous dip to the harbour slopes. There, on the white road that curves along the hillsides well above the waters of the Whanga-Raupo, it is easy to understand something of the fiery history of these hills, when the hollow that now is Lyttelton Harbour was one terrific nest of volcanoes and when the tremendous forces of confined steam and gases hurled whole mountain-tops skyward and helped to give savage shape to the walls of rhyolite rock that stand to-day little altered by the passage of the untold centuries of years. Better still, truly to understand this most wonderful part of Canterbury, one should make a traverse of the upper parts of the eastern dip by the new tracks, two or three hundred feet below the pinnacles of the ridge. Off

Te Heru o Kahukura, Sugarloaf.C. Beken, photo

Te Heru o Kahukura, Sugarloaf.

C. Beken, photo

the tracks if you care for the exercise there is rock-climbing in plenty and there are scrambles under the low-growing trees and along steep faces hanging on to the flax clumps and the tough-branched

koromiko

. And at about this level on the Hills side there are aspects of crag scenery, and crag and woodland combined, that are altogether missed by the stroller who keeps to the beaten track. Our Christchurch artists need not go further away than the inner dip of the range, the battered rim of the ancient fire cauldron, for impressions of bold rock faces straightly grand and honeycombed with curious caves, and witchy-looking weathered old trees; pictures that approach grandeur when the storm clouds swirl about the tussock-topped tors of Kahukura, the Rainbow God, giving the dark cores of the olden volcanoes an added height and mystery, or when they drift softly and mistily from the deep gullies between the ridges like steam masses from some hidden geyser.

The Mitchell Track that winds along northward between the tumbled rocks and among the hill flax gives the explorer a start on his traverse from Dyer’s Pass. It begins just opposite the picturesque stone-built tea-house with its swinging signboard and its quaint inscriptions in the saddle of the Pass, and it splendidly opens up the seaward face of the Sugarloaf whose rounded summit lifts directly over us yonder more than 1,600 feet above the harbour level. Immediately below us, in the gully that long ago was a channel for lava flow, the rocky depths are softened by the foliage of a fragment of the olden bush, a green covering for the valley floor. The valley is more attractive outside, for almost every vestige of the moss and ferns and underbrush has disappeared before grazing stock and the

The Sign of the “Kiwi,” with Marley’s Hill in the background.C. Beken, photo

The Sign of the “Kiwi,” with Marley’s Hill in the background.

C. Beken, photo

sudden torrents that have poured down from the ridge to make the little storm-creek flowing into the harbour beside the grassy mound of Pa-rakiraki. The lava-builded, notched and caverned walls of the Sugarloaf shoot up above us just here like a parapet, in regularly marked layers; tufts of flax and tussock and wiry veronica beard the face of the old fire-cliffs. Looking back at the Pass, just before we round the first bend in the rocky traverse, the cliff makes a terraced halt in its descent, and here on this tussock-grown tiny level, broidered with flax bushes and their honey-sweet

korari

blossoms, there is an eye-taking prospect of the Dyer’s Pass dip to the soft-blue sunlit harbour and of the black rock-faces and strong folds of the Port Hills southward.

Immediately southward of the Pass road the land goes easily swelling up into Marley’s Hill, a little higher than our Sugarloaf, and now a story of old-time explaining the meaning of the Maori name of that airy saddle comes to mind.

The original name of the ridge leading southward from Dyer’s Pass, and including Marley’s Hill, says Hone Taare Tikao of Rapaki, is Otu-Tohu-Kai, which being translated is “The Place Where the Food Was Pointed Out.” The tradition is that nearly two centuries ago, when the Ngai-Tahu from the North conquered this part of the country from the Ngati-Mamoe, a chief named Waitai ascended this height from Ohinetahi (now Governor’s Bay), taking with him Manuwhiri and other of the children of the chief Te Rangi-whakaputa who had taken possession of the harbour shores, in order to point out to them the good things of the great Plains. Waitai had already explored the country, and was able to tell of its worth as a home for Ngai-Tahu.

When Waitai and his companions emerged from the bush and topped the lofty round of the range, he halted, and bade them look out over the wide, silent country. He pointed to the reedy lagoons and streams that silvered the flax and tussock desert, where Christchurch City and its suburbs now spread out leisurely and shade off into the rural lands, and said: “Yonder the waters are thick with eels and lampreys, and their margins with ducks and other birds; in the plains beyond there are wekas for the catching.” The Plains, as he showed them, were plentifully studded with the ti-palm, from which the sugarykaurucould be obtained. Then, turning in the other direction, he spoke of the fish-teeming waters of the harbour, where flounders, shark, and otherkai-matai-tai, “food of the salt sea,” were to be had in abundance. Such were the foods of this Wai-pounamu; and so good seemed the land to those conquistadors as they stood there on the windy height surveying the great new country fallen into their hands, that they decided to remain in so promising a place; and it is their descendants who people Rapaki and otherkaingasto-day.

Now we turn and, passing a rugged cornice in the lava wall, descend into the gully to examine for ourselves the tree-covering of old Kahukura’s shoulders. There is a thick growth of flax on the little terraces and steep slopes above the bush, and in one place we force our way through a regular jungle of it, growing so thickly as almost to encourage the idea that a flax-mill would find profitable business here. Some of the tallkoraristalks are well in flower and bees are busy; on others the long dark-sheathed buds are just unfolding. Flax-flower honey-water makes apleasant enough drink, and the Boy Scout tastes and pronounces it good. There is a pretty Maori love-lament in which a girl compares her sorrowing self to this blossom of the flax:

“My eyes are like the wind-wavedkorariblossoms; when the breeze shakes the flowers down fall the honey showers; so flow my tears.”

A little lower and we are in the bush, taking care as we enter it to give a wide berth to the insinuating Maori nettle, theongaonga, with its unhealthy-looking light-coloured leaves covered with a thick growth of fine spines or hairs. The Boy Scout sidles warily past those bushes ofongaongawhen he is told of its poisonous qualities, and of an experience the narrator had with it years ago in the King Country bush. Away up yonder, in the Ohura Valley, between the open lands of the King Country and Taranaki, theongaongagrew into tall shrubs, ten or twelve feet high, and its virulence apparently was in proportion to its growth. All of our exploring party were more or less badly stung and suffered the effects for a day or two, but the unfortunate horses suffered most. Two of them went mad with the poisonous stings, which swelled their sides and legs, and a pack-horse actually drowned itself by bolting into a creek and lying down in the water in its desperate need of ease from the pain. Really badongaongastings provoke feverish sickness; and so it is prudent to make a detour on these hill slopes rather than encounter over-closely even these insignificant little specimens. If you are on a steep, slippery slope and reach out for a hand-grip, as likely as not instead of a friendly flax or tussock bunch theongaongawill be there waiting for you with his devilish little stinging hairs. And don’t attempt to apply to our Maori Land nettle the amiable counsel of old Aaron Hill that was given out to us in our school days:—

Tender handed stroke a nettleAnd it stings you for your pains;Grasp it like a man of mettle,And it soft as silk remains.

Tender handed stroke a nettle

And it stings you for your pains;

Grasp it like a man of mettle,

And it soft as silk remains.

Don’t, if you value your skin, try that on theongaonga.

The Seven Sleepers

The Port Hills, south-west of Dyer’s Pass,viewed from the lower slopes of Sugar Loaf, above the Governor’s Bay roadW. A. Taylor, photo

The Port Hills, south-west of Dyer’s Pass,viewed from the lower slopes of Sugar Loaf, above the Governor’s Bay road

W. A. Taylor, photo

Lower down, however, the way is clear of this bush plague, and we find ourselves under a shady roof of thick foliage, woven of the cool green leaves of the broadleaf, a smallpuka, themahoeandkowhaiand other minor trees of the Maori bush with much of thekotukutuku, the native fuchsia, now come into flower, with its masses of slender pendulous blossom giving promise of abundantkoniniberries for the birds. (Like several other New Zealand trees the fruit of thekotukutukuis given a different name from the plant itself.) The graceful lacebark or ribbonwood, too, is here in plenty; there are some beautiful specimens on these hills and slopes, and finest of all perhaps is the grand oldhouithat overshades the little Maori Church at Rapaki.Akavines interlace the close-growing trees and here and there present tangling obstacles to a passage along the gully sides. The place lacks the softness of moss and fern underfoot to which we are accustomed in the real bush; nevertheless it has something of the atmosphere of the olden forest wild; grateful bush scents are in our nostrils, the leaf-covering is close, though the trees are not tall, and the twisting character of growth and the matting of creepers help to make compact the tentage of green.

Making north-east with the general curve of the Sugarloaf slopes we leave the first bush patch and,breasting another wild garden of flax, with here and there a cabbage-tree sweetening the air with its creamy flowers, discover a deep trend to the north-west into the main valley. Here, under a steep-to uplift of the ancient igneous rock, curving out above our heads in savage cornices and rude attempts at gargoyles, we look down upon a picture of surprising beauty, one of the many surprises folded in among these Port Hills.

The old Maori Church at Rapaki.

On this side of the Heru-o-Kahukura the range is deeply bitten into by a cup-shaped valley, with oneside of the cup, that facing the harbour, cut away for the passage of the old lava streams and now the rainy season watercourses. The inside of the valley, too, is given the semblance of a fan by the numerous converging tributary gullies, separated by grassy and flax-grown ridges. There are perhaps half a dozen of these subsidiary valleys, and each one is filled with a sweet green mass of light bush similar to that behind us. The higher the little valleys, too, the more bush there is; the gully bottoms are hidden everywhere with many tinted foliage, a taller tree here and there protruding its head above its fellows, and these remnants of the ancient forest climb to the very parapets of dark and grey rock that seem to form the main defences of Kahukura’s citadel. The curving lines converge, the shouldering ridges fall away as the now dry watercourses blend into one hundreds of feet below the rocky elbow of ours.

It is perhaps half a mile across the main gully and we fix a course for the Summit track on the ridge northwards and strike down through the bush. Here in the shadowy depths there is some bird life; the trill of theriroriro, the little grey warbler, is almost constant, and an occasional fantail flits about us; but the thrush is more numerous than any native bird. When the bush bird-foods are ripe thetuisometimes pays this valley a visit from larger woodland tracks. There is a curious wildness in the valley bottom under the thicknesses of the broadleaf and themahoeandkotukutuku; it is half-dark in the deepest part, and great rocks lie hurled about, fire-born and water-worn. The floods that sometimes tear down have worn pot-holes here and there, and there are shallow caves obscured by tangles of roots and

Whaka-raupo, Lyttelton Harbour from Kennedy’s Bush

coiling stems. There is a venerablekotukutuku, a wizard of a tree, its whitened bark hanging in strips like shaggy bits of beard, its trunk all knotted and twisted, standing sentry at the entrance to a little dusky cavern; its misshapen branches, storm-battered, go searching around the broken top of the black and grey rock. Other of the trees take goblin-like shapes, and stretch out their bare roots and feelers, unsoftened by carpet of moss or ferns, to trip the intruder into their dim solitudes. It is but a little bit of a wood, this bush in the gully, but its aloofness and solitariness are made complete by the close-growing habit of the small timber and the great tossed-about rocks that help to seclude it.Totaraof some size, we observe, once grew here; there is the tall, smooth barrel of a tree now dead. In the next main gully to the northward, the Taungahara bush, on the Native reserve, there is at least one finetotara, and some big fellows were cut down there not so very long ago by the Rapaki people for fencing posts.

As we make upwards, with care evading the diabolicalongaongathat haunts the bush outskirts, we strike a steep face, with here and there a dripping of water glistening on the moss-crusted rock and on the little flax andkoromikoplants that root themselves in tiny crevices. To gain the graded and formed track again, we swarm up the fifty-foot cliff, withkoromikoandakaand flax for hand-grips. Above there is a jungle ofkoromiko, a veronica which here assumes sub-alpine habit, and weaves a wire entanglement, fortunately minus the barbs—thetataramoaor bush-lawyer in the thicket below supplies those in plenty. The butte here is topped by a rock formation so regular and resembling a ruined fortification that the Boy Scout opines itwould be a splendid place for a fight, and certainly the old shattered tor of the fire-kings, with its copses of wire-branchedkoromikoand its thick flax-clumps, suggests itself as a first-rate natural redoubt, where a few riflemen might hold out among their rocks and shrubby cover against a score of times their number.

The little bush on either hand here runs almost to the ridge top, and we come suddenly out of thekoromikothicket on to the great cave-worn ramparts and have a clear track to the Summit Road again. The picture from the breezy ridge is worth the warm scramble up through the matted bit of woodland. The long smooth rolls of hills go down to the Plains on the one hand; on the other the harbour and beyond the cloud-belted heights of the Peninsula. A misty shower is sweeping over the far indigo hills, and a rainbow shines out, grandly spanning a sector of the Peninsula, from the back of Purau to the ocean. And as we turn southward the thought comes, observing the evenly symmetrical round-sweep of the Sugarloaf summit from here, that the Maoris of old-time, who, like the ancient Incas saw in the rainbow the personification of a deity, may very well have caught from the peak’s likeness to the iris arch the poetic fancy that induced them to name it Te Heru-o-Kahukura, “The Comb (or crest) of the Rainbow God.”

By way of the easy return trail, we work back southward under the upper cliffs. Out near the Pass the crannied walls of old Kahukura echo to the voices of a party of girls, a botany class from the city. The instructor is improving the half-holiday with a practical talk on the native flora, and twenty notebooks are out and pencils busy.

“This,” announces the mentor as the class clusters round, “is a very peculiar plant, Urtica ferox, so called because——”

“Wow!” interrupts one of the earnest learners, as she stoops to rub a plump ankle.“It stings like billy-oh!” She has made the acquaintance of the truculentongaonga.

Jog on, jog on, the footpath way,[2]And merrily hent the stile-a;A merry heart goes all the day,Your sad heart tires in a mile-a.

Jog on, jog on, the footpath way,[2]

And merrily hent the stile-a;

A merry heart goes all the day,

Your sad heart tires in a mile-a.

—Shakespeare.

[2]Carved above the porch of the Summit Road Rest House on Dyer’s Pass.

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