Must speak when I take my dray through the
gorge of the Ashburton, though this is the least remarkable of them all;
in the meantime I must return to the dray on its way to Main's, although
I see another digression awaiting me as soon as I have got it two miles
ahead of its present position.
It is tedious work keeping constant company with the bullocks; they
travel so slowly. Let us linger behind and sun ourselves upon a tussock
or a flax bush, and let them travel on until we catch them up again.
They are now going down into an old river-bed formerly tenanted by the
Waimakiriri, which then flowed into Lake Ellesmere, ten or a dozen miles
south of Christ Church, and which now enters the sea at Kaiapoi, twelve
miles north of it; besides this old channel, it has others which it has
discarded with fickle caprice for the one in which it happens to be
flowing at present, and which there appears some reason for thinking it
is soon going to tire of. If it eats about a hundred yards more of its
gravelly bank in one place, the river will find an old bed several feet
lower than its present; this bed will conduct it into Christ Church.
Government had put up a wooden defence, at a cost of something like 2000
pounds, but there was no getting any firm starting-ground, and a few
freshes carried embankment, piles, and all away, and ate a large slice
off the bank into the bargain; there is nothing for it but to let the
river have its own way.
