n the British Islands. The rocky coasts as a rule rise
up steeply from the ocean, standing out in many places in bold bluffs
and high precipices. The seas round are not shallow, dull, or turbid,
but deep, blue, wind-stirred, foam-flecked, and more often than not
lit by brilliant sunshine. The climate and colouring, too, are not
only essentially un-English, but differ very widely in different parts
of the Islands. For New Zealand, though narrow, has length, stretching
through 13 degrees of latitude, and for something like 1,100 miles
from north to south. As might be looked for in a mountainous country,
lying in the open ocean, the climate is windy, and except in two or
three districts, moist. It is gloriously healthy and briskly cheerful.
Summed up in one word, its prevailing characteristic is light!

Hot as are many summer days, they are seldom sultry enough to breed
the heavy, overhanging heat-haze which shrouds the heaven nearer the
tropics. Sharp as are the frosts of winter nights in the central and
southern part of the South Island, the days even in mid-winter
are often radiant, giving seven or eight hours of clear, pleasant
sunshine. For the most part the rains are heavy but not prolonged;
they come in a steady, business-like downpour, or in sharp, angry
squalls; suddenly the rain ceases, the clouds break, and the sun is
shining from a blue sky. Fogs and mists are not unknown, but are rare
and passing visitors, do not come to stay, and are not brown and
yellow in hue but more the colour of a clean fleece of wool. They
do not taste of cold smoke, gas, sulphur, or mud. High lying and
ocean-girt, the long, slender islands are lands of sunshine and the
sea. It is not merely that their coast-line measures 4,300 miles, but
that they are so shaped and so elevated that from innumerable hilltops
and mountain summits distant glimpses may be caught of the blue salt
water. From the peak of Aorangi, 12,350 feet in air, the Alpine
climber Mannering saw not only the mantle of clouds which at that
moment covered the western sea twenty miles away, but a streak of blue
ocean seventy miles off near Hokitika to the north-west, and by the
hills of Bank's Peninsula to the north-east, a haze which indicated
the Eastern Ocean. Thus, from her highest peak, he looked right across
New Zealand. The Dutch, then, its discoverers, were not so wrong in
naming it Zealand or Sea-land.

Next to light, perhaps the chief characteristic of the country