Aspect of Port Lyttelton--Ascent of Hill behind it--View--Christ Church--Yankeeisms--Return to Port Lyttelton and Ship--Phormium Tenax--Visit to a Farm--Moa Bones.
January 27,1860.--Oh,the heat!the clear transparent atmosphere,and the dust!How shall I describe everything--the little townlet,for Icannot call it town,nestling beneath the bare hills that we had been looking at so longingly all the morning--the scattered wooden boxes of houses,with ragged roods of scrubby ground between them--the tussocks of brown grass--the huge wide-leafed flax,with its now seedy stem,sometimes 15or 16feet high,luxuriant and tropical-looking--the healthy clear-complexioned men,shaggy-bearded,rowdy-hatted,and independent,pictures of rude health and strength--the stores,supplying all heterogeneous commodities--the mountains,rising right behind the harbour to a height of over a thousand feet--the varied outline of the harbour now smooth and sleeping.Ah me!pleasant sight and fresh to sea-stricken eyes.The hot air,too,was very welcome after our long chill.
We dined at the table d'hote at the Mitre--so foreign and yet so English--the windows open to the ground,looking upon the lovely harbour.Hither come more of the shaggy clear-complexioned men with the rowdy hats;looked at them with awe and befitting respect.Much grieved to find beer sixpence a glass.This was indeed serious,and was one of the first intimations which we received that we were in a land where money flies like wild-fire.
After dinner I and another commenced the ascent of the hill between port and Christ Church.We had not gone far before we put our knapsacks on the back of the pack-horse that goes over the hill every day (poor pack-horse!).It is indeed an awful pull up that hill;yet we were so anxious to see what was on the other side of it that we scarcely noticed the fatigue:I thought it very beautiful.It is volcanic,brown,and dry;large intervals of crumbling soil,and then a stiff,wiry,uncompromising-looking tussock of the very hardest grass;then perhaps a flax bush,or,as we should have said,a flax plant;then more crumbly,brown,dry soil,mixed with fine but dried grass,and then more tussocks;volcanic rock everywhere cropping out,sometimes red and tolerably soft,sometimes black and abominably hard.There was a great deal,too,of a very uncomfortable prickly shrub,which they call Irishman,and which I do not like the look of at all.There were cattle browsing where they could,but to my eyes it seemed as though they had but poor times of it.So we continued to climb,panting and broiling in the afternoon sun,and much admiring the lovely view beneath.At last we near the top,and look down upon the plain,bounded by the distant Apennines,that run through the middle of the island.Near at hand,at the foot of the hill,we saw a few pretty little box-like houses in trim,pretty little gardens,stacks of corn and fields,a little river with a craft or two lying near a wharf,whilst the nearer country was squared into many-coloured fields.But,after all,the view was rather of the "long stare"description.There was a great extent of country,but very few objects to attract the eye and make it rest any while in any given direction.The mountains wanted outlines;they were not broken up into fine forms like the Carnarvonshire mountains,but were rather a long,blue,lofty,even line,like the Jura from Geneva or the Berwyn from Shrewsbury.The plains,too,were lovely in colouring,but would have been wonderfully improved by an object or two a little nearer than the mountains.I must confess that the view,though undoubtedly fine,rather disappointed me.The one in the direction of the harbour was infinitely superior.
At the bottom of the hill we met the car to Christ Church;it halted some time at a little wooden public-house,and by and by at another,where was a Methodist preacher,who had just been reaping corn for two pounds an acre.He showed me some half-dozen stalks of gigantic size,but most of that along the roadside was thin and poor.Then we reached Christ Church on the little river Avon;it is larger than Lyttelton and more scattered,but not so pretty.Here,too,the men are shaggy,clear-complexioned,brown,and healthy-looking,and wear exceedingly rowdy hats.I put up at Mr.Rowland Davis's;and as no one during the evening seemed much inclined to talk to me,I listened to the conversation.
