WOMAN’S TRIP ROUND THE WORLD

Dominion, Volume 19, Issue 57, 29 November 1924, Page 15

WOMAN’S TRIP ROUND THE WORLD

JEOTORUA LIKE NOTHING ELSE ON EARTH

t I cannot make out why more people do not come out to New Zealand, even if it Were only for Rotorua; for it seems to me it can be i ke nothing else upon earth in all i s to offerIn the clear, champ. -like quality of its air, the feeling .t gives you of having been washed clean from all the weariness, the sense of melan- . choly and futility, which is the long aftermath of the war in the engrossing wonders, drawing you out of yourself; and above all in its perfectly wonderful endowment of medicinal hot springs, which embrace pretty well everything which can be found in Europe, at a quarter the price, writes Elinor Mordaunt, the well-known writer, in the “Daily News.” Yesterday I went for what is called the Five Lake Drive, the only long trip which I seem to have time for; for after all I have only three clear days, and there is so much to be seen. This drive of 30 miles each way was worth even tho discomfort of being jammed up with a number of strangers in what was erroneously called “a seven-seater motor.” The first place of interest wo camo to, about eight miles out, was the Tikitere Geysers and mud holes—rtho latter far longer than those at Whakarewarewa —the Devil’s Porridge Bowl, the Devil’s Bath, and the Gates of H; 1 ! the last a pool of thick mud, the s.zo of a largish room, boiling furiously in immense seething babies. After pasing Tikitere the drive was all sheer beauty. The first part of the drive had been all within sight of Lake Rotorua; but after Tikitere, we branched off to the tiny Lake Rotokawa, or rather to the one spot which we could reach upon the side of the .steep hills which surround and shadow it so that it seems to belying there in all its beauty, looking—as a Maori woman said to me—as though it had beep dropped there at the last moment, mysterious and enchanted in a way that none of the larger lakes aro. To-day I am sitting scribbling upon the steps of a whare —or native house —which is used as a tea-room in the little village of Ohineniutu, on the edge of the lake. The native woman who keeps it has just taken tire kettle off the top of a steam hole not more than two yards from the doorstep where I am sitting, and is making my tea. Over smother hole, a foot or so further away, her dinner is cooking, covered with a piece of sacking—meat, potatoes onions. I have been helping a small boy of between two and three build a castle with his bricks, and he is now playing at my feet. He has a perfectly round dark head, as smooth as a seal’s, with the hair cut in a straight fringe across his foreliead; immense dark eyes and that wonderful deep colour which comes from the mixture of European and Maori blood.

On this child, whose grandfather,; his mother tells me. was an Englishman, it is like a deep crimson stain on weathered oak, but on some of the young girls it is like a carnation. The whole effect of the wide lake and distant mountains, with this silver veil blowing across the foreground in clouds and puffs, is beauti-

ful beyond words, while the sun is so warm that it is delicious to sit and bask in it, with tho whare between my back and the cold wind. All the same I drag myself up and off—far too long a walk—though lam fortunate enough to get a lift in a motor on the way home—to see what is called the Fairy Pool, a natural sanctuary and spawning place for trout —providing the sort of sport a fisherman might dream of. Set in the side of a hill, the pool is of triangular shape, not, I should judge, more than eight yards in each direction. And yet it is said that ten million gallons of water rise up in it every 24 hours: and not only water, for in two places a curious material, like the transparent, coarse black sand that one finds upon the beach in the Canary Islands, mingled with a 1 clear white silica, is thrown up in, say, two ever-continuous handfuls—no more. This is enough to necessitate a constant cleaning out of the pool, of which the bottom, away from this strange material, is an almost pure white lime or sand. The depth of the water is from eight to ten feet. And all this arranged by Nature as a hospitable setting to the most marvellous assembly or rainbow trout —originally imported—which one can possibly imagine, so many that they jortle each other! We move twenty yards or so down itoa stream, which runs out of the pool to Lake Rotorua, a good mile and a half away. It is running in rapids, and yet the fish are coming up it in cohorts; very soon, the caretaker tells me, the pool will be so full that one can scarcely see the water, and there is room for no more. In the sports shop in the little town there are stuffed fish—brown trout up to 25Jib., rainbow trout up to 231 b., and sea trout also topping 221 b.. A marvellous country indeed, where one catches one’s fish at one pool and cooks it at another no more than two or three feet away.

TO MY WIFE. Those eyes that were so bright, love, Have now a dimmer shine— But all they’ve lost in light, love. Was what they gave to mine; But still those orbs reflect, love. Tlie beams of former hours, That ripen’d all my joys, my love, And tinted all my flowers! Those locks were brown to see, love, That now are turned so grey— But the years were spent with me, love, That stole their hue away; Thy locks no longer share, love, The golden glow of noon — But I’ve seen the world look fair, my love, When silver’d by the moon! That brow was smooth and fair, love, That looks so shaded now— But for me it bore the care, love. That spoiled a bonny brow. And though_no longer there, love. The gloss it had of yore— Still Memory looks and notes, my love, Where Hope admired before. —Thomas Hood, in “John o’ London’s Weekly.”