Читать книгу With Axe and Rope in the New Zealand Alps онлайн

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Readers of the Rev. W. S. Green’s ‘High Alps of New Zealand’ will recollect that his conveyance found a last resting-place in the quicksands of the Tasman. Von Lendenfeld also, the year after Mr. Green, experienced an unhappy week’s delay on the eastern bank of the river. I have myself narrowly escaped drowning at the same point, and in years gone by the Tasman River has been accountable for more than one life.

The river in full flood is a sight to see; the water in places runs fifteen knots an hour, or even more. In the rapids it is piled up in the middle from sudden contraction of the banks, and forms crested billows four or five feet in height, whilst now and then a block of ice from the glacier may be seen bowling along.

The ancient glacier-formed terraces of the Tasman Valley are instructive and interesting. The highest of them are distinctly marked all down the valley for a distance of forty miles from Sebastopol—a large face of ice-worn rock near the Hermitage—on the eastern slopes of the Ben Ohau Range. The story of the ancient glacier can be read as the eye follows these strange terraces from their starting point 2,000 feet above the valley bed, down a gentle declination to the terminus of the Ben Ohau Range.