“You were quite right; it was all bush.” I have often wondered whether that experience was the basis of the passage that tells of the thrilling discovery of Erewhon beyond the pass guarded by the great images. In one of his letters about the infant Canterbury settlement Butler gives a description of Aorangi, or Mount Cook, which, so far as I know, is the earliest sketch of the mountain by a writer of note. It was, however, not an Englishman, but a German man of science, Sir Julius von Haast, who published the first careful and connected account of the Southern Alps. Von Haast was not a mountaineer, but a geologist, and though he attacked Aorangi, he did not ascend more than two-thirds of it. But he could write, and had an eye for scenery as well as for strata. The book which he published on the geology of Canterbury and Westland did very much the same service to the Southern Alps that von Hochstetter’s contemporary work did for the hot lakes. The two German _savants_ brought to the knowledge of the world outside two very different but remarkable regions. It is true that the realm of flowery uplands, glaciers, ice-walls, and snow-fields told of by von Haast, had nothing in it so uncommon as the geysers and so strange as the pink and white terraces made familiar by von Hochstetter. But the higher Southern Alps, when once you are among them, may fairly challenge comparison with those of Switzerland. Their elevation is not equal by two or three thousand feet, but the lower level of their snow-line just about makes up the disparity. Then, too, on the flanks of their western side the mountains of the south have a drapery of forest far more varied and beautiful than the Swiss pine woods. On the western side, too, the foot of the mountain rampart is virtually washed by the ocean. Take the whole mountain territory of the south-west with its passes, lakes, glaciers, river-gorges, and fiords, and one need not hesitate to assert that it holds its own when compared with what Nature has done in Switzerland, Savoy, and Dauphiny. [Illustration: MOUNT COOK]