“the Crest of the Rainbow.” · page 2

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.42

Don’t, if you value your skin, try that on the _ongaonga_.43

The Port Hills, south-west of Dyer’s Pass, viewed from the lower slopes of Sugar Loaf, above the Governor’s Bay road44

_W. A. Taylor, photo_]45

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.46 (Like several other New Zealand trees the fruit of the _kotukutuku_ is given a different name from the plant itself.)47 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.48 _Aka_ vines interlace the close-growing trees and here and there present tangling obstacles to a passage along the gully sides.49 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.50

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.51 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.52

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.53 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.54 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.55 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.56 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.57

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.58 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.59 When the bush bird-foods are ripe the _tui_ sometimes pays this valley a visit from larger woodland tracks.60 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.61 The floods that sometimes tear down have worn pot-holes here and there, and there are shallow caves obscured by tangles of roots and62

coiling stems.63 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.64 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.65 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.66 _Totara_ of some size, we observe, once grew here; there is the tall, smooth barrel of a tree now dead.67 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.68

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.69 To gain the graded and formed track again, we swarm up the fifty-foot cliff, with _koromiko_ and _aka_ and flax for hand-grips.70 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.71 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.72

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.73 The picture from the breezy ridge is worth the warm scramble up through the matted bit of woodland.74 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.75 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.76 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.”77

By way of the easy return trail, we work back southward under the upper cliffs.78 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.79 The instructor is improving the half-holiday with a practical talk on the native flora, and twenty notebooks are out and pencils busy.80

“This,” announces the mentor as the class clusters round, “is a very peculiar plant, Urtica ferox, so called because----”81

“Wow!” interrupts one of the earnest learners, as she stoops to rub a plump ankle.82 “It stings like billy-oh!”83 She has made the acquaintance of the truculent _ongaonga_.84

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.85

--Shakespeare.86

[Footnote 2: Carved above the porch of the Summit Road Rest House on Dyer’s Pass.]87