J. A. FROUDE, THE HISTORIAN, 1885.

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume XX, Issue 144, 18 June 1886, Page 1

J. A. FROUDE, THE HISTORIAN, 1885.

•' We descended to tlie Lake head . . , . . Tarawera lay unruffled in the sunshine, tree and mountain peacefully mirrored on the surface. The colour was green, as of a shallow sea. Heavy bushes fringed the shore. High wooded mountains rose on all sides of us, as we left the creek, and came out upon the open water. The men rowed well, laughing and talking among themselves, and carried us, in little more than an hour, to a point eight miles distant. Little life of any kind showed on the way ; no boat was visible but our own ; there were a- few cormorants, a few ducks, a coot or two, three or four seabirds. come from the ocean to catch sprats, and that was all. . . . At the point, or behind it, we came on a Maori farm, at the water's edge. There were boats, and nets hung up to dry, a maize-field, an orchard and a cabin. We stopped, and they offered us crayfish, which we declined, but bought a basket of apples for the crew. We were now in an arm of the lake which reached three miles further. At the head of this we landed by tho mouth of a small, rapid river, and looked about us. It ; was a pretty spot, overhung with precipitous cliffs, with ivy-fern climbing over them. A hot spring was bubbling violently through a hole in the rock. The ground was littered with the shells of unnumbered crayfish which had been boiled in this cauldron of Nature's providing. . . . We took off our boots and stockings, put on canvas shoes, which a wetting would not spoil, and followed our two guides through the bush. After a winding walk of half a mile we came again on the river, which was rushing deep and swift through reeds and ti-tree. A rickety canoe was waiting there, in which we crossed, climbed up a bank, and stretched before us we saw the White Terraces in all their strangeness ; a crystal staircase, glittering and stainless as if it were ice, spreading out like an open fan from a point .above us on the hillside, and projecting at the bottom into a lake, where it was perhaps 200 yards wide. The summit was concealed behind the volumes of steam rising out of the 1 boiling fountain, from which the silicious stream proceded. The stairs were about 20 in number, the height of each being six or seven feet. The floors dividing them were horizontal, as if laid out with a spirit level. They were of uneven breadth — 20, 30, HO feet, or even more, each step down being always perpendicular, and all forming arcs of a circle, of which the crater was the centre, On reaching the lake tho silica flowed away into the water, where it lay in a sheet, half-submerged, like ice at the beginning of a thaw. There was nothing in the fall of the ground to account for the regularity of shape. A crater has been opened through the rock 120 ft above the lake. The water, which oozes up boiling from below, is charged as heavily as it will bear with silicic acid. The silica crystallises as it comes up to tlie surface. The water continues to flow over the hardened surface, continually adding a fresh coating to the deposits already laid down ; and, for reasons whiclt men of science can no doubt supply, the crystals take the form which I have described. The process is a rapid one; a piece of newspaper left behind by a recent visitor was already as stiff as the starched collar of a shirt. Tourists, ambitious of immortality, had pencilled their names and

the date of their visit on the white surface over which the stream was running. Some of these inscriptions were six and seven years old, yet the strokes were as fresh as on the day they were made, being protected by the film of glass which was instantly drawn over them. The thickness of the crust is, I believe, unascertained, the Maoris objecting to scientific examination of their treasure. It struck, me, however, that this singular cascade must have been of recent, indeed, measurably recent, orgin. In the middle of the terrace were the remains of a ti-tree bush, which was standing where a small patch of soil was still uncovered. Part of this, where the silica had not reached the roots, was in leaf and alive. The rest had been similarly alive within a year or two, for it had not yet rotted, but has died as the crust rose round it. Clearly, nothing could grow through tho crust, and the bush was a living evidence of the rate at which it was forming. It appeared to me that this particular staircase was not, perhaps, a hundred years old, but that terraces like it had successively been formed all along the hillside, as the crater opened, now at one spot and now at another. Wherever the lock showed elsewhere through the soil, it was of the same material as that which I saw growing. If the supply of silicic acid was stopped, the surface would dry and crack. Ti-trees would then spring up over it. The crystal steps would crumble into less regular outlines, and in a century or two the fairy-like wonder at Avhioh we were gazing would be indistinguishable from the adjoining slopes. Wo walked, or rather waded, upwards to the boiling pool. It was about sixty feet across, and was of unknown depth. The heat was too intense to allow us to approach the edge, and we could see little, from the dense clouds of steam which lay upon it. We were more fortunate afterwards at the crater of the second terrace. The crystallisation is icelike, and the phenomenon, except for the alternate horizontal and vertical arrangements of the doposited silica, is like what is seen in any northern region when a severe frost suddenly seizes hold of a waterfall before snow has fallen and buried it.

A fixed number of minutes is allotted for each of the "sights." We were dragged off the White Terrace in spite of ourselves, but soon forgot it in the many and various wonders which were waiting for us. Columns of steam wero rising all round us. We had already heard, near at hand, a noise like the blast-pipe of some enormous steam engine. Climbing up a rocky path through the bush we came on a black, gaping chasm, the craggy sides of which we could just distinguish through the vapour. Water was boiling furiously at the bottom, and it was as if a legion of imprisoned devils were roaring to be left out. ' Devils' hole ' they called the place, and the name suited well with it. Behind a rock a few yards distant we found a large open pool, boiling also so violently that great volumes of water heaved and rolled and spouted as if in a gigantic saucepan standing over a furnace. It was full of sulphur. Heat, noise and smell were alike intolerable. To look at the thing, and then escape from it, was all that we could do, and we were glad to be led away out of sight and hearing. Again a climb, and we were on an open level plateau, two acres or so in intent — smoking rocks all round it, and, scattered over its surface, a uumber of pale brown mud heaps, exactly like African ant hills. Each of these was the cone of some sulphurous geyser. Some were quiet, some wero active. Suspicious bubbles of steam spurted out under our feet as we trod, and we were warned to be careful where we went. The whole place smelt of brimstone and of the near neighborhood of the nether pit. Our direction was directed specially to a hole filled with mud of a peculiar kind, much relished by the Natives, and eaten by them as porridge. To us, who had been curious about their food, this dirty mass was interesting. It did not, however, solve the problem. Mud could hardly be as nutritious as they professed to find it, though it may have had medicinal virtues to assist the digestion of crayfish. Tho lake, into which the terrace descended, lay close below us. It was green and hot (the temperature near lOOdeg), patched over with beds of rank weed and rush, which were forced into unnatural luxuriance. After leaving the mud heaps, we went down to the water side, where we found our luncheon laid out in an open air saloon, with a smooth floor of silica, and natural slabs of silica ranged round the sides as benches. Steam fountains were playing in half dozen places. The floor was hot — a mere skin between us and Cocytus. The slabs were hot, just to the point of being agreeable to sit upon.