During our unwilling sojourn on the banks of the Waikato the long wet days and nights passed drearily and slowly away. Even on foot we could not travel far, owing to the swollen creeks, but we used sometimes to go out with the gun, and range over the splendid forests which border the Waikato along its entire length and extend over the Kaimanawa Mountains in the form of a thick and almost impenetrable growth. Here we found all the varied _flora_ peculiar to this region growing in the most luxuriant way down to the edge of the boulder-strewn river and upwards for thousands of feet to the summits of the highest mountains. Whenever we came to the many bends of the river the scenery was beautiful beyond description, by reason of its rugged grandeur, and the wonderful growth of vegetation that spread itself everywhere around, as if gaining life and strength from the rapid waters as they careered madly along. The river, in most places about 100 feet wide, descended from the steep table-land in the direction of Lake Taupo, with a rapid current, over enormous boulders of trachytic rock. Gaining force and rapidity at almost every bend, its bright foaming waters fed by the steep gorges of the Kaimanawa Mountains, the snows of Ruapehu, and the rapidly-rolling creek of Tongariro, it pursued a perfectly snake-like course at the base of the tall mountains, which rose up almost perpendicularly for thousands of feet on its eastern side, while precipitous walls of pumice rock and volcanic conglomerate formed its western boundary along the table-land. The Upper Waikato forms, in fact, the main channel for the watershed of the whole of the Rangipo table-land and the western side of the Kaimanawa Mountains for a distance of over thirty miles, and every creek and river in the country through which it passes flows into it. At one point we came to a splendid gorge through which the river dashed in low, silvery cascades. On the opposite side from where we stood, the mountains rose steeply upwards to a height of about 6000 feet, forest-clad to their summits, with a dense and beautifully varied growth, where shrubs, trees, and parasitical plants mingled themselves together in a perfect network of vegetation. The banks of the river below us fell almost perpendicularly to a depth of 300 feet, but so thick was the forest verdure as we looked down to the bottom of the deep gorge below over the tops of the gigantic trees which grew beneath, that it was only now and again that we caught a glimpse of the rushing stream as it flowed over its boulder-strewn bed. Here tree-top rose over tree-top until the beautiful vegetation mounting upwards in a dense mass mingled with the vapoury clouds that hung around.