WONDERFUL WAIRAKEI.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVI, Issue 20152, 12 January 1929, Page 1 (Supplement)

WONDERFUL WAIRAKEI.

BY ELSIE K. MORTON.

THE ROCK THAT. DANCED,

" It really is not so wonderful, so enchanting," I told myself again and again, as memories of Wairakei's Valley of Wonders came thrusting back when I found myself speeding down the long road from Rotorua. " Nothing could be so wonderful as you are imagining! That Dancing Rock didn't really move—you only thought it did because the guide said it would! And this time you'd better take a note-book down the Valley with you, and not trust to a strong imagination and a feeble memory! " So then memory, well smacked, went and stood in the corner with its face to the wall. I put the Valley of Wonders out of my mind and gazed with interest on the little colony of hutments springing up like sturdy brown toadstools all over the bleak hills lining the Waiotapu Road beyond the great forests, homes of hundreds of workers on the new Rotorua-Taupo railway route. They were solid reality, anyway, and had nothing whatever to do with flights of imagination or dreams of memory.

A little later the stately Wairakei pine avenue strode up the hill before us, and the scent of sulphur-powdered pine-tassels and young green needles was in the early summer air, sweet with the heady, pungent fragrance that belongs only to those two children of the wild, pine and gorse. Down the Valley.

Like a flock of sheep we filed down the track to the Valley of Wonders, Old Jacky, the guide, in the lead, past the steaming hillside on the opposite side of the creek till we faced a white cliff glowing in the sunshine with garish streaks and patches of volcanic clays, green, rosepink, and gold, sloping down through the tea-tree to a primrose terrace with water running over it. In the middle, so perfectly shaped that it seemed impossible it had not been moulded by human hands, stood a little round object like an inverted bowl—a natural alum-pot, said Old Jacky. Punctually to tho moment Wairakei burst into action, turning the Valley into pandemonium, sending up vast clouds of snowy steam and a fountain of scalding water—up—up—till all the hillside was blotted out in a thick blanket of vapour. Then came deep subterraneous niutterings from the throat of tho geyser, tho gurgle and wash of receding waters, and WairaUei sank into temporary quiescence.

Thou tho phenomena of the Dragon's Mouth, red, scorched jaw upthrust, that panting, terrible throat forever gaping, forever awaiting a victim. Once before, greatly venturing, I had crawled into those horrid jaws and smiled with deadly intensity while a camera clicked, and the dragon coughed up scorching, gusty breaths that would have warmed the coldest-.footed adventurer, but those tricks are sternly forbidden nowadays, and Jackv, suspicious of me from the start, fixed his eye on me and refused to budge from the geyser until I had clicked my camera shut and obediently taken my place in the flock. The Dancing Rock.

Then we stood in a beautiful little glade where scented fern and quaker-grass, beaded with tiny pearls of moisture, drooped from rose-red banks. A tui trilled and chimed his little bells in the blossoming manuka thicket, the cicadas droned lazily overhead. . . . At our feet lay the pool of the Twin Geysers, crystal clear, leading the gaze down to" black, unfathomable depths. Just beneath us jutting out toward the centre of the pool, some six or eight inches below the surface was a great flat rock. We gazed into the chasm, and suddenly something iu the black depths stirred, woke to life. A blue and silver spiral of bubbles came rushing up, and then—the miracle! The solid ground beneath our feet quivered with one heavy thud, the great rock rose amid a sudden, tempestuous swirl—sank, rose again—with my own eyes 1 saw it!—-and next instant fury was let loose in that unhallowed pool! Great clouds of vapour came belching up, a hissing, boiling fountain shot straight up from the depths as wo turned and ran and then pool and rock and sky were blotted from view, as the spirit of that underground inferno thrashed the water into a seething maelstrom. And then, in new. awe-stricken wonder, I told myself the Dancing Rock had indeed danced, that Wairakei's Valley of Enchantment was even more uncanny, more beautiful and terrible than I had ever dreamed!

The geyser subsided; waves of boiling water gushed over the little fall into a fern-fringed pool, and then from somewhere deep down came a new sound, a well-timed, heavy beat that brought back strange, haunting memories of childhood. " Thump-thump—", a steady, rhythmic throbbing that I had not, heard for years, a thrashing and churning of water. Suddenly I remembered! The old North Shore paddle steamers, the Britannia with her bravo painted panels, the Eagle with her golden birds—l could almost hear the clang of the engine-room gong, see the great, shining rods slow down as the beat of the paddles subsided. An Hour In Wonderland. No place was this for a hurried visit, no dashing through this wonderland at the tail of a party of twenty! Old Jacky eyed us doubtfully when we said we would stay. " Very well, but you get back quick when that rock moves! " So we obediently promised, and there wo stayed beneath the blossoming manuka for an hour, seated in a shady nook with steam holes and porridge-pots gasping and plopping beside us, listening in turn to the little peaceful song of the creek and to the uproar of the Twin Geysers and the Paddlewheel. Then at last we retraced our steps, for other incredible memories must be strengthened—the Champagne Cauldron, with its sinister black walls, its steamclouds pouring up into the sky, its lovely, opal-blue pool that turns to white fire even as you watch it. splashing and'tormented, "filling the air with tumult as the boiling water leaps over the primrose and gold and emerald terrace to the creek beneath. In sole and precious possession, we rambled through the valley, lingering by the Eagle's Nest to marvel anew at the ribbed, "pink-brown marble of the petrified manuka roots piled round the mouth of the geyser. Through Hell's Gate we passed, with a Red Admiral flirting and dancing over a boiling pit rimmed with delicate ferns, with a young grapevine curling its tendrils about the teatree branches overhead. We walked across a hard coral terrace streaked with gold and carmine, crossed little bridges where black, steaming holes opened up beside the track, passed boiling pools of pink and buff-coloured muds,, bursting up into strange flowers, leaping the air like frogs, and everywhere was this same strange mingling of beauty and terror, wicked red-black rifts in the earth rimmed with tender ferns, tiny orchids and soft mosses, boiling streams flowing over naked rock in tiny runnels of pure primrose, edged with green and black and gold. Nowhere in all New Zealand, save at Wairakei and Taupo, may you find this freakish flinging of colour straight from Nature's palette. She has painted here as one who, in the moulding of a new land, had stored up all the strange, vivid colourings she could not use for the tinting of a workaday old world, all the flaming colours stolen from earth's fires and the matrix of its jewels . . . then despaired of her job, left the fires still burning, flung down palelte arul paints and let the colours run in rainbow welter over the face of her great, unfinished masterpiece _ . • , And if you doubt it, go and visit that Vallev of' Enchantment for yourself, and yi.u <vill find the half has not been told!