Very soon after we left this place the new driver, a son of Mr. Newman, told us that we were in the Buller Gorge. The river running through it is very wide and deep, with a tremendous current, and the road on its bank, with the cliffs rising precipitously above it, in many cases overhanging it, was nearly all the way on the edge of a sheer drop of some hundred feet to the water below, and not nearly wide enough for two vehicles abreast. It is widened here and there for the coaches to pass, but as the road winds with the river one cannot see far ahead, and we conjured up a vision of uncomfortable moments when we might have to back our frisky thoroughbreds for perhaps a quarter of a mile to let another coach, or a lumbering transport waggon, go by. Happily we did not realise that vision.
The cliffs were massed with many-coloured ferns, creepers, shrubs and mosses, with water everywhere, trickling over red granite, and in cascades and small waterfalls innumerable. Most of the tree-trunks on the river edge were so enveloped in moss as to be several times their natural thickness, with ferns and vines growing on and out of them. On the other side of the river there are forest-clad hills, the trees growing to a great height, mostly pine and birch, with now and then a great rata resplendent in its vivid scarlet.
But unhappily the mist that hung about the hills prevented our seeing the full beauty of the Buller Gorge. A good deal of the time it rained so hard that we were obliged to have umbrellas up, when the prospect reminded me of a disgusted tourist who, coaching under similar conditions in Ireland, remarked acidly that she “had come a long way across the ocean to see such beautiful Irish scenery!”
At last we crossed the river on a punt propelled by the strong current and guided by overhead wires. Leaving it behind we climbed the opposite bank and drove for seven or eight miles through perfectly flat and most of it dreary half-cleared country whereon was nothing but stubble or bracken,—a fitting prelude to our arrival at the hideous town of Westport.
Then was it only by the flicker of an eyelid that Captain Greendays and I averted an attack of those tyrannous nerves, whose long abstention from aggression had made us almost forget their existence. As the coach drew up at the door Mrs Greendays looked at the dismally ugly surroundings of the miserably cheerless barn-like building that called itself the “Grand Hotel,” and an expression that we knew only too well grew in her face, poor dear lady, while in freezing accents she demanded,
“Is this where we are to spend two whole nights and a day, Tom?”
Captain Greendays was engaged in unwrapping the rugs, and his reply was somewhat incoherent.
“’Frisco mail to write—doesn’t much matter where one is when one is busy,—good thing there is nothing to tempt one out of doors!”
Such was the burden of his hurried defence of a situation he was not in any way personally to blame for bringing about. But his wife had long since
