There are few experiences more impressive to the feelings than to stand alone in the recesses of a kauri forest. Unlike the character of the mixed bush—the forest where trees of many other kinds are found—the kauri bush is weirdly depressing from its terrible monotony. It is solemn, sombre, and gloomy to the last degree. Yet is there a profound majesty about it that awes one in spite of oneself. The trees stand closely together, not branching out much till near the top. They cover range and gully, mountain and plain, in unbroken succession. At the base they may girth as much as up to fifty feet. Forty feet of girth is not uncommon, and thirty feet is often the average. They soar up straight to a hundred, a hundred and fifty, even to a hundred and eighty feet before branching, and then their leafy crowns, interlaced together, form a canopy through which daylight hardly penetrates. The boles of these woodland giants are mostly black and smooth, sometimes covered with twigs, though this chiefly in the smaller trees. Supple-jack, bush-lawyer, mounga, various creeper-ferns with magnificent fronds, and sometimes flowering clematis, swing from trunk to trunk and knit the columns together. Below there is not the thick undergrowth that prevails in the varied bush, but a lighter tangle of shrubs. Ferns, among which several varieties like the maidenhair predominate, grow waist-high in rank luxuriance. The sublime grandeur of a kauri forest is hardly equalled by anything else of the kind in nature. One seems to stand amid the aisles of a mighty temple, shut out from the world and imprisoned amid endless ranks of tremendous columns. Stillness and silence deepen the profundity of gloom around one. The fiercest gale may be raging overhead, and not a leaf is stirred within the dark coverts; only the faint murmur of the foliage far above betrays what is passing. Of life there is nothing visible. The little fantails, the traveller's friends in the bush, hover around one, and they are all one sees, unless it be, perchance, the rapid flash of a rat running up some trunk, or the scuttling of a kiwi or weka amid the fern. To get some real notion of what these forests are like let us compare them with English woods. The latter bear the palm of beauty, but the former that of grandeur from their very vastness. The largest wood in England is but the size of one dingle in a kauri forest, and is flat and tame contrasted with the hilly ruggedness of the land here. Again, measure the girth of English beeches, oaks, elms, and ashes. The oldest and best grown woods will not give you an average girth of ten feet. Trees girthing fifteen to twenty feet are rare and singular. What is this to the giant kauri?