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
[Illustration: 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
[Illustration: 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 sugary
_kauru_ could be obtained. Then, turning in the other direction,
he spoke of the fish-teeming waters of the harbour, where flounders,
shark, and other _kai-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 other _kaingas_ to-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 tall _korari_ stalks are well in flower
and bees are busy; on others the long dark-sheathed buds are just
unfolding. Flax-flower honey-water makes a pleasant 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-waved _korari_ blossoms; 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, the _ongaonga_,
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 of _ongaonga_ when 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, the _ongaonga_
grew 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
bad _ongaonga_ stings 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 the _ongaonga_ will
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 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 the _ongaonga_.
[Illustration: 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 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 small _puka_, the _mahoe_
and _kowhai_ and other minor trees of the Maori bush with much of
the _kotukutuku_, the native fuchsia, now come into flower, with
its masses of slender pendulous blossom giving promise of abundant
_konini_ berries for the birds. (Like several other New Zealand
trees the fruit of the _kotukutuku_ is 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 old _houi_ that overshades
the little Maori Church at Rapaki. _Aka_ vines 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.
[Illustration: 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 one side 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
the _riroriro_, 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 the _tui_
sometimes 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 the _mahoe_ and _kotukutuku_; 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
[Illustration: Whaka-raupo, Lyttelton Harbour from Kennedy’s Bush]
coiling stems. There is a venerable _kotukutuku_, 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. _Totara_ of 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 fine _totara_, 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 diabolical _ongaonga_
that 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 and _koromiko_ plants that root themselves in
tiny crevices. To gain the graded and formed track again, we swarm up
the fifty-foot cliff, with _koromiko_ and _aka_ and flax for
hand-grips. Above there is a jungle of _koromiko_, a veronica
which here assumes sub-alpine habit, and weaves a wire entanglement,
fortunately minus the barbs--the _tataramoa_ or 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 it would be a splendid place for a fight,
and certainly the old shattered tor of the fire-kings, with its copses
of wire-branched _koromiko_ and 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 the _koromiko_ thicket 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 truculent _ongaonga_.
* * * * *
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.
[Footnote 2: Carved above the porch of the Summit Road Rest House on
Dyer’s Pass.]