Читать книгу Black Beech and Honeydew - Ngaio Marsh, Stella Duffy - Страница 17
ОглавлениеGlentui is a bush-clad valley running up into the foothills of the Southern Alps between Burnt Hill and Mount Thomas. The little Glentui river churns down this valley, icy-cold and swift among its boulders. The summit of Mount Richardson from which it springs is called Blowhard and from here one looks across a wide hinterland, laced by the great Ashley river, to the main range. The Alps are the backbone of the South Island. When, in comparatively recent geological times, New Zealand was thrust up from the bed of the Pacific, this central spine must have monstrously emerged while the ocean divided and its waters streamed down the flanks of the heaving mountains and across the plains until they found their own level and the coastline was defined in a pother of foam. Ours is a young country. Everything you see in the South Island leads up to the mountains. They are the leitmotif of a landscape for full orchestra.
Glentui is about thirty miles crow’s-flight from our hills. On winter mornings when the intervening plains are often blanketed in mist, it seems much closer and on a nor’ west evening in summer when a strange clarity, an intensity of colour, follows the sudden lapse of the wind, one can see in detail patches of bush and even isolated trees. So that we were, in a sense, familiar with Glentui long before we camped there in the first summer of my schooldays at St Margaret’s. We were a large party: two of the middle-aged Walker Boys – Colin and Cecil – Mivvy, the four Burtons, Aileen’s and Helen’s fiancés, who were called John and Kennedy, and Sylvia, another schoolfriend. To reach Glentui was an all-day business. We had to go roundabout: by train to Rangiora, a mid-plains town, and then by a meandering branch line to Oxford, where we lunched at a country pub. Here, in sweltering midsummer heat, we picked up two farm carts loaded with stores, tents, shooting equipment, and hay for our sleeping-sacks. Then came an eight-mile plod round the foothills and across the great bridge over the Ashley. The air, as clean as mountain water, smelt of sun-baked tussock and our load of hay. On hilly stretches we climbed down and walked to ease the horses. Tuis sang in the hills. Is the song of our native birds really as beautiful as we think? The tui, black-coated with a white jabot, has a deep voice and changes his tune with the seasons, often interrupting himself with a consequential clearing of his throat. Sometimes he sings the opening phrase of ‘Home to our Mountains’ and sometimes two liquid notes, a most melodious shake and a final question. I tried to suit words to his song: ‘Remote. Remote. Alone and fordone. Gone,’ but they didn’t really fit and I was left with that aftertaste of an acute pleasure that always resembles pain.
In the late afternoon we reached Glentui and turned up the valley to find a camping ground. The carts jolted down a rough track and we ran ahead of them into the bush.
On our side of the ranges the bush is hardy: not gigantic and lush like the Westland forests but tenacious and resistant to sun and wind. Most of the trees are native ‘beech’ with an undergrowth of flowering-creepers, mosses and fern. The smell is glorious. As we entered, we heard the little Glentui river. It flowed through the silence like some cool and preoccupied conversation. We found a clearing and below it, at the base of a steep bank, the stream itself, emergent from a small gorge.
