Excerpt from A Climber in New Zealand Some of the loftiest summits are visible in the far distance from the railway which runs down the east coast of the island from Christchurch to Dunedin, but to appreciate the full grandeur of the range it must be seen either from out at sea or from points north of it on the west coast. The view from the seaport of Greymouth on that coast, nearly a hundred miles from Aorangi, is not only one of the finest mountain views which the world affords, but is almost unique as a prospect of a long line of snows rising right out of an ocean. One must go to north-western America, or to the Caucasus where it approaches the Euxine, north of Poti, or possibly to Kamschatka (of which I cannot speak from personal knowledge), to find peaks so high which have the full value of their height, because they spring directly from the sea. The Andes are of course loftier, but they stand farther back from the shore, and they are seldom well seen from it. In Southern New Zealand the line of perpetual snow is much lower than it is in the Alps of Europe. It varies, of course, in different parts of the range but generally speaking, a mountain feet high in New Zealand carries as much snow and ice as one of feet in the Swiss Alps, and New Zealanders point with pride to glaciers comparable to the Aletsch and the Mer de Glace. On the west, some of the great ice-streams descend to within seven hundred feet of sea-level, and below the line Of perpetual snow the steep declivities are covered with a thick and tangled forest, extremely difficult to penetrate, where tree ferns grow luxuriantly in the depths Of the gorges. The region is one of the wettest and most thickly wooded in the world; and it is a region that might have lain long unexplored, except in those few spots where gold has been found, had it not been for the growth, about seventy years ago, of the passion for moun taineering, which has carried British climbers all over the earth in search of places where their prowess could find a field for its display. The first who forced their way into it were some New Zealand Government surveyors in 1 8 6 2. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.