Page:Tales-of-Banks-Peninsula Jacobson 2ed 1893 cropped.pdf/270

sands. The track winds on the left-hand side of the gully going down, and crosses the first tongue of bush running out on to the tussocked peaks pretty near the Summit. In making this road a strange thing occurred. Though the track was cut through the virgin bush, where none had been known to go before, the largest tree at the creek crossing, a large broadleaf, was found to have been carved with the letters L, y, A, r. The gully was thereupon called after the lady who was then Miss Lucy Aylmer, and it bears her name on the Government maps to this day. The hills on the right hand side of the valley are very steep in places, and there is one great beetling crag that overlooks the valley, out of which springs a marvellous stone steeple, a splinter formed by some convulsion of nature into an exceptional shape. Above this again towers the Devil’s Gap, a great double rock, between the pinnacles of which the road to Little River passes. Grey and stern as they are at the summit, near the base these rocks are clad in the loveliest foliage, and wherever a fissure in their sides gives room for a root to penetrate, there is a curtain of emerald leaves. For a long way the beauty of the scene is unmarred by the so-called improvements, and we feel we are really travelling under the shadow of “the forest primeval;” but, on a corner being turned, the usual hideous array of trunk-covered ground and bare sticks, which look what they really are—the naked skeletons of burnt trees tortured in the fire,—spring up around us.

On reaching the burnt ground, we come to a creek that has had its rocky bed torn into strange shapes by a great slip from the top of the overlooking spurs. Mr. Worsley was camped near when the slip came down, and woke and listened to the terrible thunder of the descending rocks; but they spared him, stopping their mad course, however, only a few yards from his tent. It must be remembered that