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.