The Second Is Purely Prospective; It Will Be Very Valuable For
Planting On The Tops Of Walls To Serve Instead Of Broken Bottles:
Not a
cat would attempt a wall so defended.
Snow-grass, tussock grass, spaniard, rushes, swamps, lagoons, terraces,
meaningless rises and indentations of the ground, and two great brown
grassy mountains on either side, are the principal and uninteresting
objects in the valley through which we were riding. I despair of giving
you an impression of the real thing. It is so hard for an Englishman to
divest himself, not only of hedges and ditches, and cuttings and
bridges, but of all signs of human existence whatsoever, that unless you
were to travel in similar country yourself you would never understand
it.
After about ten miles we turned a corner and looked down upon the upper
valley of the Rangitata - very grand, very gloomy, and very desolate.
The river-bed, about a mile and a half broad, was now conveying a very
large amount of water to sea.
Some think that the source of the river lies many miles higher, and that
it works its way yet far back into the mountains; but as we looked up
the river-bed we saw two large and gloomy gorges, at the end of each of
which were huge glaciers, distinctly visible to the naked eye, but
through the telescope resolvable into tumbled masses of blue ice, exact
counterparts of the Swiss and Italian glaciers. These are quite
sufficient to account for the volume of water in the Rangitata, without
going any farther.
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