Waimakiriri just after a fresh, when the water was thick, and I assure
you I did not like it. I crossed it first on the plains, where it flows
between two very high terraces, which are from half a mile to a mile
apart, and of which the most northern must be, I should think, 300 feet
high. It was so steep, and so covered with stones towards the base, and
so broken with strips of shingle that had fallen over the grass, that it
took me a full hour to lead my horse from the top to the bottom. I dare
say my clumsiness was partly in fault; but certainly in Switzerland I
never saw a horse taken down so nasty a place: and so glad was I to be
at the bottom of it, that I thought comparatively little of the river,
which was close at hand waiting to be crossed. From the top of the
terrace I had surveyed it carefully as it lay beneath, wandering
capriciously in the wasteful shingle-bed, and looking like a maze of
tangled silver ribbons. I calculated how to cut off one stream after
another, but I could not shirk the main stream, dodge it how I might;
and when on the level of the river, I lost all my landmarks in the
labyrinth of streams, and determined to cross each just above the first
rapid I came to. The river was very milky, and the stones at the bottom
could not be seen, except just at the edges: I do not know how I got
over. I remember going in, and thinking that the horse was lifting his
legs up and putting them down in the same place again, and that the
river was flowing backwards. In fact I grew dizzy directly, but by
fixing my eyes on the opposite bank, and leaving Doctor to manage
matters as he chose, somehow or other, and much to my relief, I got to
the other side. It was really nothing at all. I was wet only a little
above the ankle; but it is the rapidity of the stream which makes it so
unpleasant--in fact, so positively hard to those who are not used to it.
On their few first experiences of one of these New Zealand rivers,
people dislike them extremely; they then become very callous to them,
and are as unreasonably foolhardy as they were before timorous; then