_Southward to New Zealand--Into the Hot-Water Country--Coaching Days
come back--The Early Victorian Inn--The Fire and Snow of Ruapehu--A
Hotel run wild--Hot Lakes and Steaming Rivers--The Devil’s Trumpet--The
Valley of the Burning Fountains--Waking up the Champagne Lake._
OF the other island groups that I visited during that pleasant year or
two of wandering--strange Fiji, exquisite Norfolk Island, the wicked,
unknown New Hebrides--I have told elsewhere. But before the great P. &
O. liner carried me away from Sydney on the well-known track across the
seas to England and home, I had a journey through New Zealand that
was second to nothing in the world, for pure enjoyment, but the
unsurpassable Islands themselves.
New Zealand is not yet fully opened up--that was what the geography
books said in my school days. The saying, like most geography-book
information, slipped through my mind easily, and did not create any
marked impression. The marked impression came later, when I went half
round the world to see New Zealand, and discovered that I could not take
train to just anywhere I chose. It seemed incredible, in a country as
highly civilised as France or Germany, that coaches--not the ornamental
tourist brand, run as an accompaniment to railways, but real Early
Victorian coaches, with “no frills on them” of any sort or kind--were
the only means of transit, save boats, to a great part of the famous hot
lake and river district of the North Island. One could go to Rotorua,
the most remarkable collection of geysers and hot lakes, direct by rail
from Auckland. But the lovely Wanganui River, the beautiful up-country
bush, and whole duchies of hot-water and mud-volcano land, could only be
“done” by coach and boat.
[Illustration: 0447]
This made the journey more interesting, on the whole, though it was a
little amazing at first to leave the railway far behind, and strike
out right into the early nineteenth century. One should have worn
side-curls, a spencer, and a poke bonnet, instead of the ordinary
tourist coat and skirt and useful straw hat, to feel quite in character
with the mud-splashed coach, its six insides, two outsides, and four
struggling, straining horses; the days of wind and shower, the hurried
meals eaten at lonely little wayside inns, and the nights spent in
strange barrack-like, barn-like places, where the stable was of more
importance than the house, and every one always arose and fled like a
ghost at the early dawn of day.
But first, after the railway town and railway hotel were left behind,
came Wanganui River, a whole day of it; nearly sixty miles of exquisite
loveliness, viewed in perfect comfort from the canopied deck of a river
steamer. The Wanganui has been called New Zealand’s Rhine, but it no
more resembles the Rhine than it resembles a garden-party or an ostrich
farm. It has nothing whatever in common with Germany’s great historic
river but its beauty; and the beauty of the Wanganui is of an order very
far indeed removed from that of the ancient castle-crowned streams of
Europe, which are strewn with records of dead and decaying æons of human
life. Solitude, stillness, absolute, deathly loneliness are the keynotes
of Wanganui scenery. Shut in by fold on fold of great green mountain
peaks, scarp on scarp of fern-wreathed precipice, one can almost fancy
that the swift little paddle-steamer is churning her way for the first
time into solitudes never seen of man. Now and then a Maori dug-out
canoe, long and thin and upturned at the ends, may be sighted riding
under the willows, or gliding down-stream to the swift paddle-strokes
of its dusky-faced occupant. At rare intervals, too, the spell of silent
lonelinesses broken by the sight of some tiny river-side settlement
perched on a great green height--half a dozen wooden houses, and a
tin-roofed church; the whole being labelled, with some extraordinarily
pretentious name. One of our passengers that day got in at London, and
went on to Jerusalem; another was booked from Nazareth to Athens!
All New Zealanders are _not_ Maories, despite the hazy ideas as to
colour which exist at home. There is a little trifle of nine hundred
thousand full-blooded white settlers, to compare with the few thousand
native Maories still left, in the land they once owned from sea, to sea.
Still, the Maori in New Zealand is an unmistakable fact, and a most
picturesque fact into the bargain. To see a family taking deck passage
on the boat--handsome dark-eyed women, with rosy cheeks in spite of
their olive skins, and beautifully waved black hair; bright elfish
little children; dogs and cats and a sack or two for luggage--: is
an interesting spot in the day’s experience, especially when some
patronising passenger, accustomed to “natives” in other countries, gets
one of the delightful set-downs the Maori can give so effectively.
For all their shapeless clothing and heavy blankets, hatless heads and
tattooed lips and chins, the New Zealand Maories are very much “all
there”; and when the patronising saloon passenger struts up to one, and
remarks: “Tenakoe (good-day), Polly! You got ums nicey little fellow
there, eh?”
“Polly” will probably reply in excellent English: “My name happens to
be Te Rangi, not Polly; and as for the child you are referring to, I
believe it belongs to the lady in the yellow plaid sitting aft!”
At the end of the day comes an hotel, standing on a wooded cliff above
the river, and looking down upon a long lovely stretch of winding water
and high-piled forest. The night is spent here, and in the morning
comes the coach, with its team of four fine satin-skinned bays, its
many-coated driver, its portmanteaux on the roof, mysterious little
parcels in the “boot,” and confidential letters in coachman’s hat, for
all the world like something in Charles Dickens. There is no bugle and
no guard, and the coach itself is a high, long-legged, spidery thing
enough, not even painted red, and though it is “Merry Christmas” time, it
is a warm summer day, with some prospect of thundery rain, but not
the faintest of any typical Dickensesque Christmas weather. Still, the
sentiment is there, so one may as well make the most of it.
All day, muddy roads and straining horses; all day, a long pull up-hill;
half the day rain in the wet lovely bush, starring and sparkling the
exquisite tree ferns, those fine ladies of the forest; crystal-dropping
the thick coat of ferns that tapestries the tall cliffs, shutting in our
road. Beneath the wheel curve innumerable black-green gorges, deep
and dark as Hades, gurgling in their mysterious depths with unseen
full-throated streams and half-glimpsed waterfalls. About and above
us rises the impenetrable “bush”--tall green trees, feathery, cedary,
ferny, flowery, set as close together as the spires of moss on a
velvet-cushioned stone, shutting out half the sky; marking off an
unmistakable frontier between the territory of still unconquered Nature
and the regions wrested from her by toiling Man. Wood-pigeons flash
their blue-grey wings across the valleys; the merry mournful _tui_
flutes “piercing sweet by the river,” undisturbed by our rattling
wheels. There are wild creatures in plenty, further back in the
bush--wild boars, wild cattle, wild cats, and “dingoes” or dogs--all
originally escaped from civilisation, but now as wild as their own
savage ancestors. The feathery bracken, that carpets all the banks by
the wayside, was, and indeed still is, a staple food of the Maories.
Its young roots are excellent eating, being rather like asparagus,
and reasonably nourishing when nothing better can be had--and the
white-flowered tea-tree--one of the tree-heath family---has often
furnished a “colourable imitation” of China tea, to the benighted
bush-wanderer run out of the genuine leaf. This bush about us is all
Maori land. Maories alone can find their way easily and safely through
its pathless mysteries. No, there is no avoiding the Maori, anywhere in
the North Island!
Dinner, warm and grateful and unspeakably comforting, is met with at
a little inn in a little settlement whose name (of course) begins with
Wai. The towns in North New Zealand that do not begin with Wai begin
with Roto. There are a few others, but they hardly count. We are all
amazingly cheerful when we issue forth warmed and fed; and the cold
wind that is beginning to blow down from the icy mountain peaks just
out of sight, is encountered’ without any British-tourist grumbling.
The driver explains that the wind ought not to be so cold--never is
in December (the New Zealand June); but somehow, this is “a most
exceptional season,” and there has been a lot of rain and cold that they
don’t generally have. Across twelve thousand miles of sea my mind leaps
back to home; I feel the raspy air of the English spring nipping my
face, and hear the familiar music of the sweet old English lie about
the weather. It is a dear home-like lie, and makes me feel that New
Zealand is indeed what it claims to be--the Britain of the Southern
Cross.
The effect of dinner is wearing off, and the insides are saying things
about the weather that make a lonely wanderer like myself long to clasp
the speakers warmly by the hand--because they sound so English. Now I
understand what puzzled me a good deal at first--the difference between
the Americanised, Continentalised Australians and the perfectly British
New Zealander. The Briton cannot retain his peculiar characteristic in
a climate like that of Australia; deprived of his natural and national
grumble about the changeable weather, he is like a dog without a
bark--an utterly anomalous being, But the New Zealand climate is windy
and showery, given to casting autumn in the lap of spring and throwing
winter into the warm, unexpecting arms of summer. So the Briton of the
South, settled among his familiar weather “samples,” remains like the
Briton of the North; and the travelling Englishman or Englishwoman,
visiting New Zealand, feels more entirely at home than in any other
quarter of the globe. It is only fair to New Zealand, however, to add
that the average summer, beginning in December, is at worst very much
warmer and pleasanter than the English spring or winter, and at best, a
season of real delight.
Late and dark and cold is the evening when we rattle up to the
accommodation house planted in a strange desert spot, where the night is
to be passed. Another coach comes in and discharges its load by-and-by.
The Dickensonian flavour increases, as we of the earlier coach sit round
the great ingle-nook fire of blazing logs in the coffee-room, silently
surveying the new comers, while they shed their many wraps and crowd
about the blaze. To how many Early Victorian tales--Dickens, Bulwer
Lytton, G. P. R. James--have not the lonely inn and the late arriving
guest been the familiar commencement!
But the three Maories, man and two women, alighting from the coach
and taking their place in the warm room, break through the illusion
of Victorian romance at a touch, as a passing figure breaks through a
gossamer cobweb stretched across a furzy path. Even G. P. R. could have
had no dealings with those tall bundled-up, black-eyed, self-possessed
beings from the bush. He would have turned them out in despair,
or turned himself out, and gone back to his mysterious,
Spanish-complexioned gentlemen in furred riding-cloaks.
A nipping early morning sees us off at seven o’clock; the discontented
innkeeper, with (apparently) a dark crime on his conscience, seeing
us go with obvious relief. It is too evident that like rather many
backwoods hotelkeepers, he regards the harmless necessary traveller in
the unflattering light of “the pig that pays the rint.”
Ruapehu’s giant cone, covered with dazzling snow, soars 3,000 feet into
heaven above us. We are high up ourselves, for we pass the 4,000 foot
level later on, rather cold and cross, and inclined to regard the little
flag of hot smoke creeping out of the crest of Ngaurhoe, a smaller
volcano ahead, as the most desirable thing in nature. Brumbies (wild
horses) skim the plains below us, quick-moving little dots of black
against the buff-colour of river valleys and fiats of sand. “There’s a
fellow hunting those at present,” volunteers the driver--“catches and
breaks them, and gets thirty shillings apiece for them for youngsters to
ride to school. The kids must have something, you know, and the brumbies
are wiry little brutes.”
No one walks on two legs in New Zealand, apparently. I recollect
a picture that the coach passed only yesterday evening--a man on
horseback, and two dogs, fetching home a cow and her calf from a pasture
a quarter of a mile away from the homestead. In England the whole outfit
of man, horse, and dogs would have been represented by one small child
with a pinafore and a stick. Other countries, other manners.
One o’clock, forty-two miles out, with a stop for a fresh team; and we
now enter a valley where we are met by the strange sight of a puff of
steam rising from a bushy dell, and a little river that glides along
with smoky vapours curling up from its surface. We are in the hot-water
country at last; this is Tokaanu, and from here to Rotorua, ninety miles
away, the earth is dotted, every now and then, with boiling springs,
erupting geysers, hot lakes, and warm rivers. In all this country you
need never light a fire to cook, unless you choose; never heat water to
wash your pots and pans, or to bath yourself. The Maories, and many of
the whites, steam all their food instead of boiling or baking it; and as
for hot baths, an army might enjoy them all day long.
The valley is warm and pleasant; Lake Taupo lies before us, thirty miles
long, wide and blue and beautiful as the sea, sentinelled by tall peaks
of dazzling white and purest turquoise, and all embroidered about the
shores with gold braiding of splendid _Planta Genista_ scattered in
groves and hedges of surpassing richness. Three hours in a tiny steamer
brings us, To the othér side; and here, the sights of the hot-water
country fairly begin.
The Spa Hotel, at Taupo (where one passes the night and as many days as
one has time for), is a museum; an exhibition, and very-good joke, all
in itself. One might fairly describe it as hashed hotel, served up with
excellent sauce. You find bits of it lost in a wilderness of rose and
rhododendron, at the end of a garden path; half a dozen bedrooms,
run away all along among the honeysuckles to play hide-and-seek;
a drawing-room isolated like a lighthouse in a sea of greenery; a
dining-room that was once a Maori assembly-house, and is a miracle of
wildly grotesque carvings, representing, the weirdest of six-foot goblin
figures, eyed and toothed; with pearl-shell, and carved in the highest
of alto relievo, all down the walls. White sand pathways, run, between,
the various fragments of the hotel; a hot stream, breathing curly vapour
as it goes, meanders, about the grounds, captured here and there in deep
wooden ponds, under rustic roofs, or hemmed in by walls and concealing
trees, to make the most attractive of baths. There is sulphur, and soda
and free sulphuric acid in these, waters; one spring, welling up all
by itself, has iodine. For rheumatism, skin diseases, and many blood
diseases, these constantly running pools are almost a certain cure. It
seems a shocking waste of golden opportunities to let this chance go by
without being healed of something; but I can only collect, a cold in the
head, a grazed ankle, and a cracked lip, to meet the occasion--of all
which evils the baths at once relieve me, offering in their place
an appetite which must seriously impair my popularity with the
proprietress, though I am bound to say she hides her feelings nobly.
There is a celebrated “porridge pot,” or mud volcano, near this hotel.
I have not time to see it; therefore I leave it with gentle reproaches
ringing in my ears, and hints to the effect that I shall be haunted on
my deathbed by unavailing regret. But I meet the Waikato River directly
after, and at once forget everything else. Never anywhere on this earth,
except in the hues of a peacock’s breast shining in the sun, have I
seen such a marvellous blue-green colour as that of this deep, gem-like,
splendid stream. And the golden broom on its banks, the golden broom
on the heights, the golden broom everywhere--bushes eight and ten feet
high, all one molten flame of burning colour, with never a leaf to be
seen under the conflagration of riotous blossom--what is the English
broom, or the English gorse, compared to this?
All the six miles to Wairakei, we follow the Waikato River; watch it
sink into a deep green gorge; break into splendid foam and spray down
a magnificent fall, that alone might make the fortune of any hotel in a
less richly dowered country; wind underneath colossal tree-clad cliffs,
in coils and streaks of the strange emerald-blue that is the glory of
the river, and finally bend away towards the Arateatea Rapids. Another
hotel built after the charming fashion of the Taupo hostelry, receives
the coach occupants. The style of architecture sets one thinking.
Where, twenty years ago, did out-of-the-way New Zealand light upon the
“pavilion” system, that is the very latest fancy of all modern-built
sanatoria? Has the liability to occasional small earthquake tremors
anything to do with it? Whatever the cause may be, the result is that
the fresh-air system is in full swing in nearly all the New Zealand
thermal resorts; that doors and windows are always open, paths take the
place of passages, and everybody acquires the complexion of a milkmaid
and the appetite of a second-mate.
The hot outdoor swimming bath is a toy with which one really cannot stop
playing. It is something so new and so amusing to dive into a bath 90
feet long and 102 deg. Fahrenheit as to heat; swim about like marigolds
in broth, in a temperature that would cook an egg in a few minutes, and
all the time see the exquisite weeping willows wave overhead, the tall
grasses stand on the bank, the wild clematis tremble in the trees above
the pool. After the hot dip, one steps over a partition into another
bathful of cool spring water, only 68° in heat, to cool down; and then
comes dressing in a little bath-box (shut off from the grounds, like all
the bath, by a high board fence), followed by a two minutes’ walk back
to the house. But again, when night comes on, and the moon silvers the
weeping willows to the semblance of pale frost-foliage on an icy pane,
and the dim wraith-like vapours of the pool float up in ghostly shapes
and shadows about the darkness of the inner boughs, one is tempted to
come down once more, gliding hurriedly through the chill night air to
the pool, locking the door, and floating for an hour or more in the
dim, warm, drowsy waters. Cold? No one ever gets cold from the thermal
waters, even if the cool dip is left out. That is one of their chiefest
charms.
With the morning, I am informed that life will not be worth living to me
any more, if I do not see the Geyser Canon. Some one declares that it
is the most beautiful sight in New Zealand; some one else says that it
frightens you most delightfully, in the safest possible way; and “one
low churl, compact of thankless earth,” says that it is extremely
instructive. This last calumny I must at once deny. Interesting, to the
deepest degree, the Wairakei Geysers are; suggestive also beyond any
other geological phenomena in New Zealand; but instructive, after the
tedious scientific-evenings fashion of our childhood, they are not. They
are too beautiful for that, and too fascinating. One ought, no doubt,
to absorb a great deal of geological information during the tour of the
valley, but one is so busy having a good time that one doesn’t. Which is
exactly as it should be.
Coming round the corner of the path that leads to the geysers, one sees
a column of white steam rising over the shoulder of the hill, among the
greenery of tea-tree and willow, exactly like the blowing-off steam of
some railway engine, waiting at a station. It is indeed an engine that
is blowing off steam; but the engine is rather a big one--nothing less,
indeed, than that admirable piece of work, Mother Earth herself. Ingle,
the guide, now comes out of a tin-roofed cottage at the entrance to the
valley, and starts to show us the wonders of the place.
Now be it known that Mr. Ingle is a very remarkable character, and
second only to the geysers themselves, as a phenomenon of singular
interest. He is one of the very few men in the world who know all about
geysers, and quite the only one who can literally handle and work’ them.
Ingle knows how to doctor a sick geyser as well as any stableman can
doctor a horse; he can induce it to erupt, keep it from doing so, or
make it erupt after his fashion, and not after its own. He is the author
of at least two scientific discoveries of some importance, combining
the effects of steam pressure on rocks and the incidence of volcanoes
along certain thermal lines. In fact, what Ingle does not know about the
interior of the earth, and the doings down there, is not worth knowing;
and he tells us much of it as he takes us over the canon. Instructive?
Certainly not. It is all gossip about volcanoes and geysers--personal,
interesting, slightly scandalous gossip (because the behaviour of
some of them, at times, and the tempers they exhibit, _are_ simply
scandalous); but not “instructive”; assuredly not.
The average tourist likes to have every sight named--romantically or
comically named, if possible--and his tastes have been fully considered
in the Geyser Canon. I am not going to quote the guide-book titles of
the dozen or two thermal wonders exhibited by Ingle. Staircases of
pink silica, with hot water running down them; boiling pools of white
fuller’s earth, with miniature volcanoes and geysers pock-marked all
over them: sapphire-coloured ponds, where one can see fifty feet of
scalding depths; the great Wairakei Geyser, casting up huge fountains of
boiling steam and spray every seven minutes; twin geysers living in one
pool of exquisite creamy stalactites, and erupting every four minutes
with the punctuality of a watch; geysers that throb exactly like the
paddles of a steamer, or beat like the pulse of an engine; geysers
that throw up great white balls of steam through crystal funnels of hot
water; geysers that cast themselves bodily out of their beds at regular
intervals, leaving you with exactly nine minutes in which to scramble
down the hot wet rock of the funnel, stagger through the blinding steam
that rises from the rents and fissures at the bottom, and climb up the
other side again, into coolness and safety, to wait and watch the
roaring water burst up through the rock once more; geysers that make
blue-green pools oh the lip of milky and ruddy terrace of carven silica;
that explode like watery cannon, in definite rows, one after another;
that build themselves nests like birds, send boiling streams under
rustic bridges, scatter hot spray and steam over’ richly drooping ferns,
and plant rainbow haloes on a scalding cloud of mist, high above the
clustering trees of the valley--these are the sights of the canon, and
they need no childish names to make them interesting. When a visitor
gets into the Geyser Canon he is like a fly in a spider’s web. He
cannot get away from this colossal variety entertainment. He runs from a
nine-minute geyser to see a four-minute geyser do its little “turn,” and
by this time the number is up for the seven-minute performance of the
great star, so he hurries there; and after that he must just go back
and see the twin geysers do another four-minute trick, and then there is
quite another, which will do a splendid “turn” in twenty-seven minutes’
time, if he only waits--and so half a day is gone, without any
one noticing the flight of time, until the sudden occurrence of a
“passionate vacancy,” not at all connected with the geysers or their
beds, informs the traveller that another meal-time has, unperceived,
come round.
The Arateatea Rapids fill in the afternoon. From the high road where the
open coach stands waiting, down through a pretty woodland of greenery
and shadow and thick soundless moss, one follows a narrow pathway
towards an ever-increasing sound of rushing, tumbling, and thundering,
out, at last, on to a projecting point where one stands right over a
rocky canon filled almost to the brim with a smother of white rolling
foam, woven through with surprising lights of clear jade green and
trembling gold. And here, on the brink of this half-mile of rapids, over
the roaring water, I give it up. I do not attempt to describe it. When
you take a great river, exceptionally deep and swift, and throw it
over half a mile of sloping cliff, things are bound to happen that are
somewhat beyond the power of pen and ink to render. Who has ever read a
description of a waterfall, anywhere, written by any one that conveyed
an impression worth a rotten nut? Every one who goes to see Arateatea
must manufacture his own sensations on the spot. Sheer fright will
certainly be one of them; not at anything the innocent rapids are doing
to the beholder, but at the bare notion of what they might do, one foot
nearer--one step lower down--one---- Let me have a couple of trees to
hold on to, please. Thank you, that is better.
Many years ago, a party of twenty Maories had a narrow escape from the
cruel embraces of snow-white Arateatea. They were canoeing on the upper
river; and, partly because the trout in the Waikato are the biggest
trout in the world, partly because some of the rowers had had too much
fun at a “tangi,” or wailing party, the night before, and were not very
clear-headed, they forgot to think of the current until it had them
fairly in its clutch, whirling them along only a mile or two above the
terrible rapids. They could not reach the shore, and they dared not
swim. One would have supposed that nothing could save them from being
beaten to pieces against the cruel rocks in the rapids--yet they escaped
that fate.
They went over the Huka Falls, which come a mile or two above the rapids
(the Maories had forgotten all about that) and were decently drowned
instead.
I am sorry that the above is not a better story; but the fact is, that
tourists are not very plentiful about Wairakei, and the natives have not
yet learned to invent the proper tourist tale. That is about the best
they can do as yet.
It will hardly be credited, but there is not even a Lover’s Leap in the
whole valley; not a story of an obstinate father who got opportunely
boiled in a geyser, while his daughter eloped down a scalding river in a
motor-boat worked by the steam from the surface--nor a tale of a flying
criminal pursued by executioners, who leaped from side to side of a
gorge some thirty feet across and got away. This is certainly remiss of
the authorities; but I have no doubt the Government Tourist Department
would take the matter up, and supply the necessary fiction, if suitably
approached.
[Illustration: 0470]
In the meantime travellers must be satisfied with the rather bald and
uninteresting tale of a Maori maiden named Karapiti, who jumped into the
steam blow-hole bearing her name, because her _fiancé_ did not meet her
there on Sunday afternoon as arranged to take her to afternoon tea at
the Wairakei Hotel. At least, that is one version of the tale, and it is
quite enough for the Smith family from London, and other representative
tourists.
“You should have given yourself more time.”
“Whatever you are going to do later on, this place really requires at
least a week.”
“You cannot possibly miss so-and-so, or this and that!” Such are
the reproaches that haunt the hasty traveller through the Hot-Water
Country--reproaches fully deserved in nearly every case, for very few
tourists who journey to New Zealand realise the amount of time that
should be spent in seeing the miracles of the volcanic zone, if nothing
really good is to be omitted.
It results in an unsatisfactory compromise as a rule--some “sights”
being seen; many passed over. There is always something fascinating just
ahead, calling the traveller on, and something wonderful close at hand,
which demands the sacrifice of yet another day, before moving. Such a
superfluity of beautiful and wonderful sights can assuredly be found
nowhere else on earth. Iceland is far inferior; the famous Yellowstone
Park of America has only a stepmother’s helping of what might be New
Zealand’s “left-overs.” The lovely, lamented Pink and White Terraces
are by many supposed to have been the only great thermal wonder of the
country. This is so far from being the truth that only a good-sized
volume could fairly state the other side of the question. I have never
met any traveller through the thermal districts who had succeeded in
seeing everything of interest. All whom I saw were as hard at work as
the very coach-horses themselves--walking, driving, climbing, scrambling
each hour of every day, and often thoroughly overdoing themselves,
in the plucky attempt to carry away as much as possible from this
over-richly spread banquet of Nature’s wonders.
I squeezed out an afternoon for Karapiti (the “Devil’s Trumpet”) and
the Valley of the Coloured Lakes. By this time I was a little jaded with
sight-seeing, disposed to talk in a hold-cheap tone of anything that
was not absolutely amazing, and to taste all these weirdly impressive
marvels with a very discriminating palate. Karapiti, however, is cayenne
to any jaded taste. It is known as the “Safety-Valve of New Zealand,”
and the term is peculiarly fitting. The whole of the Hot-Water Country
is only one plank removed from the infernal regions; it almost floats
upon the scalding brow of molten rock, liquid mineral, and vaporised
water, that composes the earth interior immediately below. That it
is perfectly safe to live in (a constant wonder to outsiders) is very
largely due to just those steam blow-holes and geysers which excite the
fears of the nervous-minded--and the colossal dragon-throat of Karapiti
is the most important safety-valve of all.
Walking up the hill’ to the blow-hole, many hundred yards off, one hears
its loud unvarying roar, like the steam-thunder that comes from an ocean
liner’s huge funnel, when the ship is ready to cast loose from shore.
The ground as one gets nearer is jutted and uneven, and perceptibly warm
in certain spots. Rounding a corner, one comes suddenly upon the Devil’s
Trumpet, a funnel-shaped opening, ten feet across at the lip, in the
bottom of a cupshaped hollow. A fierce jet of steam rushes out from the
Trumpet, thick and white as a great marble column, and roaring horribly
as it comes forth. The pressure is no less than 180 lb. to one square
inch, and the rush of this gigantic waste-pipe never slackens or ceases,
night or day; nor has it done so within the memory of man.
“If it did, I’d look for another situation pretty sharp, for it wouldn’t
be ’ealthy to stay around Wairakei no more,” observes one guide, who
is showing off the monster to us by throwing a kerosene can into the
jet, and catching it as it is violently flung back to him, many yards
away. “I can throw a penny the same,” he says, and does so, getting back
the coin promptly, a good deal hotter than it went in.
One of the ladies of our party is nearly reduced to tears by the
sinister aspect, the menacing horror of the spot. She begs to be taken
away, because she knows she will dream about it. She does dream about
it; I know that, because I do myself, that night; and the dreams are
not nice. Still, I would face them again for another look at roaring
Karapiti. It is a wonder of wonders, a horror of horrors, unlike
anything else in the world. On the whole, I am glad of that last fact.
Too much Karapiti would certainly get on one’s nerves.
There have never been any accidents to travellers here. No one could
fall down the hole, because the funnel narrows rapidly, and is only
about two feet across in the inner part. All the same, one cannot safely
approach very near, for there is an in-rush as well as an out-rush,
and if any one did fall victim to it, and stumble into the funnel, the
highly condensed steam would strip the flesh from his bones as quickly
as a cherry is shelled off its stone.
The Valley of the Coloured Lakes came next. I wonder what the
inhabitants of Brighton or Bath would do--how they would advertise, how
they would cry for visitors--if they had a valley at their very
gates which contained a scalding hot river, tumbling over pink and
cream-coloured cascades of china-like silica, in clouds of steamy
spray--a great round pond, set deep in richest forest, and coloured
vivid orange, with red rocks round the brim; another, crude Reckitt’s
blue; another, staring verdigris green; another, raspberry pink; others
still, yellow as custard and white as starch! All these ponds are hot;
they are coloured by the various minerals they hold In solution, but
they have not yet been chemically analysed, so it is only possible
to speculate as to the exact cause of the colours. Seen from a height
above, the ponds resemble nothing so much as a number of paint-pots;
and that, indeed, is one of the names by which the valley is generally
known.
Leaving behind me, unlooked at, still more than I had seen, I took coach
again next morning for Rotorua. It was an early and a chilly start, for
we had over thirty miles to do before lunch. The light, springy coach,
with its leather-curtain sides, was filled with a cheerful party, all
young, all enjoying themselves heartily, and all full of the genial good
spirits that come of much open air and a holiday frame of mind. _New_
New Zealand at its best was represented there, much as Old New Zealand
was represented by the silent bearded men, with the lonely-looking eyes,
who travelled in the Pipiriki and Waiouru stages of the journey.
How fast the spanking team swings in along the road! How lovely the
changing panorama of the encircling hills, now velvet-brown with rich
green dells and valleys, now far-off pansy-purple, now palest grey,
seamed with crimson streaks of hematite! The air is very clear to-day,
with that strange New Zealand clearness that changes every-distance to
sea-blue crystal, and pencils every shadow sharp and square.
We have left the royal gold broom behind us; but the beautiful manuka
scrub of the valleys is in full blossom, exquisitely tipped and touched
with white lace-like blossoms. It is almost as if a heavy hoar-froat had
misted over every delicate green bough with finest touches of silver.
Arum lilies bloom in the ditches; the Maori flax, like tall iris leaves,
wanders wildly over hill and valley; great fields of Pampas grass wave
their creamy plumes over the shot green satin of thick-growing leaves.
Wild horses, as the coach goes by, look warily out from behind some
woody knoll, or canter away across the plains with their long-legged
foals. Some of them are fine creatures, too, worth catching and
breaking, and many are taken there from time to time. What a happy land,
where a man can go out and pick a fine horse in a mountain meadow, much
as you pick a daisy at home!
Lunch-time befalls at another of the inevitable Wais--Waiotapu, this
time--and before the coach starts on the last stretch of eighteen
miles to Rotorua, I go across the road to see the only one of Waiotapu’s
sights for which I have time--the Champagne Pool and Alum Cliffs.
These are to be found on a most extraordinary milk-coloured plain, which
looks exactly as if a careless giant had been mixing colours and trying
brushes on it, and left everything lying about. The rocks and heights,
the deep dells with boiling pools and grumbling geysers at the bottom,
the narrow pathways leading here and there, are spotted and streaked
with carmine, rose madder, scarlet, primrose, bright yellow, and amber.
The “Cliffs” are a succession of rocky heights composed of something
very like cream fondant, which is mostly alum. At their feet opens out
a fascinating succession of bays and inlets full of variously
coloured water, at which I can only glance as I pass. There are two
mustard-coloured pools, and one pale green, among them. Close at hand
the overflow from the Champagne Pool rushes, steaming fiercely, over a
fall of rocks which appear to have been very newly and stickily painted
in palest primrose colour. Alum, sulphur, and hematite are responsible,
I am told, for most of these strange hues. Sulphur and arsenic have
coloured the Champagne Pool itself--a great green lake, almost boiling,
and of a most amazing colour--something between the green of a peridot
and that of Chartreuse. It has never been bottomed; the line ran out at
900 feet when tried. The edge of all the lake is most delicately wrought
into a coralline border of ornamental knobs and branches, canary yellow
in colour. Its name is derived from the curious effect produced in the
depths of the pond by a handful of sand. The water begins to cream and
froth at once, like champagne or lemonade, and continues to do so in
places for at least half an hour.
[Illustration: 0476]
And now we hurry back to the coach once more, and on to Rotorua, wonder
of wonders, and thermal temple of every healing water known to the
medical world.
[Illustration: 0488]