Lake Kaurapataka
"It can be beautiful from a distance, when the sun comes flashing down a wall of green and the river voices break through the stillness. But if you stand alone in a trackless glen, hearing no sound save the wood pigeons high up on the limestone bluffs, or a tui picking out his notes from an unseen branch, the twilight seems to creep almost audibly among the thickets, and the forest reveals itself as something that is not ours, something that has never belonged even to the Maori, but has known centuries of an undisturbed stillness, or has contained some dream of life too strange for our minds to grasp. Perhaps it is merely an emptiness that reveals itself in the silence of the forest. But even that is something to be feared." (Holcroft)
Comments
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chuzz "Many of the harbours are believed to be the flooded craters of old volcanoes. These are facts, always pressing upon perceptive minds, that should develop in New Zealanders a sense of impermanence. A sharpened sense of time, leading towards a conception of prehistoric solitudes that dwarfs the present outline of things, settles upon the spirit at the gateways of the Southern Alps and in the deep gorges where the green-blue waters slide swiftly down from the land of glaciers. To stand on some tussock hill below an assembly of peaks is to know that the country has lived a secret life of its own which is no concern of ours and which we can never hope to understand". (Holcroft)
23 September 2010
ID 5050
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