_From Heaven to Hades--Gay Rotorua--Where One lives on a Pie crust--The
Birth of a River--Horrible Tikitere--In the Track of the Great
Eruption--Where are the Pink and White Terraces?--A Fountain fifteen
hundred feet high--Foolhardy Feat of a Guide--How the Tourists were
killed--A Maori Village--Soaping a Geyser--The End._
RED roofs and white verandahs; straight sandy streets of immense width,
planted with green trees, and spindling away into unnaturally bright
blue distances; omnibuses, phaetons, motor-cars, and four-in-hands
passing at long intervals towards the shining lakes that lie beside
the town; puffs of white steam rising up among green gardens and open
fields; a ring of amethyst-coloured hills surrounding the whole bright
scene, bathed in such a white, pure, crystalline sun as never shines on
misty England. That is Rotorua, a half-day’s journey from Auckland, and
the centre of the wonderful geyser region of New Zealand.
Every one now-a-days knows that New Zealand possesses wonderful geysers,
but not quite everybody knows what a geyser is; and certainly very
few are aware of the extraordinary richness and variety of the geyser
country. Geysers are intermittent fountains of boiling water, in height
from a couple of feet up to fifteen hundred--the enormous altitude
reached by Waimangu the Terrible, greatest geyser of the whole world.
They consist of a shaft reaching down from the surface of the earth to
deep, very highly heated reservoirs of steam and boiling water below;
and (usually) of a siliceous basin surrounding the shaft-opening,
and full of hot water. Some geysers open in the centre of a cone of
siliceous sinter, built up by the deposits from the water, and have no
basin.
[Illustration: 0492]
The periodic explosions of active geysers are due to the following
facts--water under heavy pressure requires a much higher temperature
to boil than water free from pressure. While the water high up in the
geyser pipe may be a little under 212 degrees, that in the lower levels
may be standing at 50 or 60 degrees higher, and only kept from expanding
into steam by the weight of the column above it. If anything lessens
that weight or increases the temperature of the lower water, this latter
will explode into steam, and drive the upper waters high into air with
the force of its exit from the shaft. This, briefly, is the theory of
geyser action.
Rotorua itself, the great focus of the healing forces of Nature in the
geyser district, is simply a crust over a mass of hot springs, charged
with various minerals. Three feet under earth you will find hot water,
in nearly any part of the town. There are hundreds of hot springs in the
neighbourhood that have never been analysed. Of the many that are in use
in the Government Sanatorium, the “Priest’s Water” and “Rachel Water”
are the most famous. The former cures rheumatism, gout, and blood
diseases, while “Rachel” makes her patrons “beautiful for ever” by
curing all forms of skin trouble, and bestowing a lovely complexion, not
to speak of the remarkable effects of the spring on nervous affections.
There are also wonderful hot swimming baths, much patronised by the
casual tourist; baths of hot volcanic mud, and baths of hot sulphur
vapour rising direct from the burning caverns under the earth.
But for people who are in good health, it is the “sights” of Rotorua
that are the chief attractions, and these are very many. One of the
loveliest, and a welcome change from the countless hot-water springs,
is Hamurana, surely the most beautiful river source in the world. It is
reached by a journey across one of the lakes in a steamer. All the way
the great lake ripples purest turquoise under a high, clear, cloudless
sky; green islands rise bright and cool from its shining surface,
sharply peaked and shadowed mountains, on the distant shores, stand out
in strange hues of crystalline hyacinth unknown to our northern climes.
By-and-by the little steamer leaves us on a green wooded shore, and we
take boat up a fairy river to a region of enchanted beauty. Blossoming
trees line the sun-steeped banks; the water is of the strangest
colours--jade-green, clear molten sapphire, silver/ emerald, and
transparent as a great highway of rock crystal. Enormous trout, weighing
up to twenty pounds, rush from under our keel; grass-green and rose-red
water weeds quiver far beneath the oar. Wild fuchsias, wild cherries,
loaded with scarlet fruit, snowy-flowered tea-tree, arum lilies, yellow
broom, and pink dog-roses, hang out over the water. But a few hundred
yards, and the big lovely river comes to a sudden end, walled in
by blossoming bushes, and apparently cut short in the strangest’ of
culs-de-sac. In reality it is the source we have reached; here the whole
Hamurana stream springs full-grown from the earth. A great rift in the
bed of the glassy river is visible, where the water wells up under our
keel in wavering masses of amber, aquamarine, and deep blue, shot with
glancing arrows of prismatic light. Five million gallons are poured
forth from this deep cold cavern every twenty-four hours--each drop as
clear as a diamond, and as pure. The force of the upspringing stream
is so great that pennies can be thrown in from the boat without sinking,
to the bottom of the cavern--the water sends them back, and casts them
out into the shallows about the edge of the rift. Sometimes a small
silver coin will slip down into depths, and lie glittering many fathoms
below, magnified conspicuously by the transparent water. The Maori
natives, who are marvellous divers, have tried time and again to
reach-this tempting store of treasure; but no man can stem the uprushing
torrent of water, and if the coins were gold, they would be as safe
as they are now from being taken by human hands. The most determined
suicide could not drown himself in the Hamurana River source, for the
stream about the source is shallow, and the cavern water itself would
not permit him to sink, however willing he might be.
The Valley of Tikitere, some ten miles from Rotorua, is the greatest
contrast that could possibly be conceived to Hamurana’s enchanted
loveliness. Enchanted indeed this valley also plight be, but by a spell
of evil. It is the nearest possible approach to the familiar conception
of hell. A stretch of white siliceous soil, streaked here and there with
the blood-coloured stains of hematite, or the livid yellow of sulphur,
is pitted all over with lakes, pools, and small deep pot-holes of
boiling mud, sometimes thick, sometimes thin, but always scalding,
bubbling, spirting, and threatening. Chief of all the horrors is the
well-named lake, “Gates of Hell.” Standing upon a bank of white earth
that is warm underfoot, and seamed with steaming cracks, one looks down
upon a ghastly hellhole of a seething cauldron, slimy black in colour,
and veiled with stinging mists that only now and then lift sufficiently
to show the hideous surface of the lake. The foul broth of which it is
composed bubbles and lifts ceaselessly, now and then rising into ominous
heights and waves that seem about to break upon the banks above. The
heat reaches our faces, as we stand half-stifled on the pathway. Just
beside us, a large pool of bubbling mud, which stands constantly at 2120
Fahrenheit--ordinary boiling point--seems almost cool in comparison.
Little wonder that is so; for the “Gates of Hell” is largely composed of
sulphuric acid, and its surface temperature is 232°.
[Illustration: 0463]
Beyond lies a perfect wilderness of boiling mud-holes of every kind.
Here, there is a pond of mud as thick as porridge; there, one fluid as
cream. Here, the deadly, scalding surface lies innocently smooth and
unrippled; there, it leaps and thunders like a young volcano in action.
At one corner we come suddenly upon an ugly black archway, leading to
no inviting interior; nothing can be seen within; but the loud gurglings
and chokings of the seething depths inside restrain any desire for
closer observation, “The Heavenly Twins,” derisively so-named, are two
boiling mud-lioles not a foot apart, but quite unconnected; one boils
the thickest of brews, while its twin concocts the thinnest.
One must follow the guide closely and carefully about these ghastly
wonders. One step off the pathway, and a horrible death awaits the
careless walker. Even the path itself is only cool and solid on the
outside skin. The guide stops now and then to dig his stick into the
whitey-brown earth for a couple of inches, and turn up a clod all
glittering on the under-side with fresh crystals of sulphur. This
under-side is so hot that one can hardly touch it with the unprotected
hand.
From one deep mud-hole, of a comparatively reasonable temperature, mud
is taken out for medical uses. It is wonderfully effective as a bath,
for soothing pain and curing sleeplessness. Further on, on safe ground,
one can see a hot waterfall about twenty feet high, in temperature about
100°, which is used as a douche bath by invalids of many kinds, with
remarkable results.
On the edges of the valley, I see for the first time in detail exactly
how the “fumarole,” or steam blow-hole, is used for cooking purposes.
Over the opening of a small manageable blow-hole, an inch or two across,
is placed a box without a bottom. The food to be cooked is placed in the
box, either in a pot, or wrapped in leaves. The lid is then put on, and
covered with clay. In an hour or so the meat or stew is done to a
turn; and even if left too long, it cannot be burned. One blow-hole,
in constant use by the Maories, is not steam at all, but hot sulphur
vapour, which deposits a crust of sulphur on everything it touches. This
does not trouble the Maori, however; he eats his food quite contentedly,
with a strong sulphurous flavour added to its natural taste, and says
it does him good. Certainly, the natives living about Tikitere are
unusually strong and hearty in appearance, and never troubled with any
kind of illness.
People of middle age will doubtless remember vividly the impression
created all over the world in 1886 by the eruption of the great volcano
Tarawera, and the destruction of New Zealand’s most cherished natural
wonder--the peerless Pink and White Terraces of Rotomahana. Count-, less
marvels have been left, and one new one that far outstrips the Terraces
in sheer wonder and magnificence--Waimangu, the greatest geyser in the
world; but New Zealand still laments her beautiful Terraces, and shows
the spot where they lie deep, buried under ninety feet of volcanic
débris, as though pointing out the grave of something loved and lost.
A day of wonderful interest is that spent in seeing the track of the
great eruption. Leaving Rotorua early in the morning, I saw, as the
coach wound up the hilly road outside the town, many traces of that
awful night and day of darkness, thunder, and terror, eighteen years
ago. Although Rotorua is fifteen miles or more from the site of the
Terraces, the sky was dark all the day of the eruption, and only three
or four miles from the town black volcanic dust fell so densely as to
leave a stratum several inches thick over the country. This is clearly
visible in the cuttings at the side of the road, where the black stratum
can be seen underlying the more recent layer of ordinary soil. Where the
great coach-road to Rotomahana once ran, a chasm some sixty feet deep
scars the mountain side, caused by the fearful rush of water that took
place down the road-track. An earthquake crack, thirty feet deep, runs
close to the road for a long distance. All the way up to the buried
village of Wairoa, similar traces can be seen. But before the village
is reached, two gems of scenic loveliness are passed--the Blue and
Green Lakes, lying side by side, each enclosed by steep rugged hills,
reflected clearly on its glassy surface. One is of the strangest, most
delicate Sèvres blue--a colour, not depending on any reflection from
above, for I saw it on a grey and cloudy day--the other is a bright
verdigris green. “Chemicals in the water” is the very vague reason given
by inhabitants of the district for these remarkable beauties of colour.
I must note here that in no case have I succeeded in obtaining any
satisfactory reason for the remarkable blues and greens so common in
both the cold and hot waters of the thermal district. The Waikato River,
a great cold stream, full of immense trout; Taupo Lake (cold); the
coloured lakes of Wairakei and Waiotapu (hot); Hamurana Springs (cold),
and many others, display these remarkable tints, under every sky and
in every depth of water. Varying reasons are given, but none seem
satisfactory. The beauty of the colouring is, at all events, certain,
and the cause may safely be left to geologists.
Wairoa Village is now a green, silent waste of young forest and rich
grass, broken only by the ruins of the old hotel that stood there before
the eruption, and by a few scattered traces of other human occupation--a
fragment of wall, the rusty skeleton of an iron bedstead, lying in a
gully; the remains of a shattered buggy. In 1886 it occupied the place
now held by Rotorua, and was visited by numbers of tourists, all anxious
to see the Terraces, which lay not far away at the other end of the
chain of lakes now united in one, and called Rotomahana. On the day of
the eruption, the roof of the hotel was broken in by red-hot falling
stones and mud, and eleven people were killed. Some, who escaped, ran
out and took refuge in a native “warry” or hut, which, strange to say,
remained uninjured. Over a hundred people in all--mostly Maories--were
killed by the eruption, which destroyed millions of acres of good land,
swept away several native villages, and utterly altered the face of the
whole country.
Lake Tarawera, which must be crossed to see the site of the lost
terraces, lies under the shadow of the great volcanic cone of Tarawera,
8,000 feet high, from which much of the molten rock and burning ashes
came. It is as lovely, in its own strange way, as the famous lakes of
Italy and Switzerland. The water is intensely blue, and the high hills
closing it in are of a colour unknown to most other scenery in the
world--a strange pale barren grey, so nearly white as to be slightly
suggestive of snow. Like snow, too, is the distribution of this coloured
matter; it lies on the crests and projections of the hills, and is
streaked thinly down the sides. It is ash, volcanic ash, cast out by
the surrounding craters on that fatal night of June, 1886, and lying
unchanged on the hills about the lake ever since. Tarawera itself towers
above the lake, grim and dark and ominous; a mountain hot yet tamed
by any means, and still hot, though not molten, in the interior of the
cone.
On the shores of the lake, as the launch carries us past, can be seen,
at one spot, the whitened bones of some of the natives who perished in
the eruption. The name and titles of one, who was a great chief, are
painted on a rock that overhangs the shore.
Rotomahana, the second lake, is also surrounded by ash-whitened hills.
At the far end, as our second oil-launch starts to cross, we can see
thick columns of steam rising against the grey of the cliffs. These are
the gravestones of the lost Pink Terrace; these tall pillars of cloud
alone mark the spot where one half of the world’s greatest wonder once
stood. Just where the launch starts, the White Terrace was buried,
under a hundred feet of earth and mud, deep in the bed of the lake.
What were the Terraces like? New Zealand has many oil paintings of them,
so that a clear idea of their loveliness can be formed even to-day.
They consisted of two immense terraced slopes, formed by the action of
downward dropping hot water heavily loaded with silicon. Every terrace
was a succession of fairy-like baths and basins, filled with bright blue
water. One was pure ivory-white, the other, tinged with hematite,
was bright pink., The exquisite natural carvings and flutings of the
silicon, the beautiful tints of the terraces, the blue sky above and
blue lakes below, together formed a picture the like of which does not
exist on earth to-day.
Our oil-launch, sailing now over water which is actually boiling, close
in shore, though the main body of the lake is cold, allows us to land on
the very spot where the Pink Terrace once stood. It is a dangerous task,
even with the aid of a guide, to pick one’s way about this stretch of
ground, for it is nothing but a crumbling honey-comb of boiling-water
ponds, and narrow ridges as brittle as piecrust. Over these latter we
take our perilous way, planting each footstep slowly and carefully,
but never standing still, for the ground is so exceedingly hot that the
soles of one’s boots are scorched, if planted long in one place. The
earth is choked and clouded with steam, the ponds roar and bubble about
our feet, the blow-holes rumble. The ground is full of raw cracks, old
and new, and as our small party steps over one of these, on the way
back, it is seen to be visibly wider than it was on the previous coming!
To-morrow the whole of this narrow ridge may have crumbled in and
disappeared. No one is sorry to reach the launch again, and glide away
from those threatening shores.
A little further on, where we land for the walk up to Waimangu Geyser,
there is a hot iodine spring, unique among medical waters, and most
useful in many diseases. Arrangements are now being made to have the
water collected and sent to Rotorua; up to the present, it has only been
used by the Maories.
All the three-mile walk up to the geyser is crowded with tokens of the
great eruption. Mud cliffs a hundred feet in height were created by the
terrible outburst, and for miles about the whole country was covered
yards deep with the boiling slimy mass. Not only Tarawera, but three
other craters (all visible in the high distance above the lake) were
erupting together, for a night and a day. The eruptions took place
without the least warning of any kind, about ten o’clock at night. The
chain of lakes about Tarawera’s foot suddenly exploded like colossal
bombs, blowing their entire contents, and all the mud from their
bottoms, over the whole country-side. Tarawera and the neighbouring
craters cast out huge jets of flame, and scattered burning masses of
rock, ashes, and scoriæ, for many miles. The noise was terrible, and the
sky for twenty miles around was dark at noonday. It is supposed that the
eruption was caused by the falling in of the lake bottom, which allowed
the water to drop into the underlying fires, and exploded the lakes
instantly into steam.
Up a great earthquake chasm, among deep volcano craters that were formed
at the time of the eruption, we climb towards the Great Geyser. These
craters are for the most part still in a more or less heated state,
though grass and ferns grow in the interior of nearly all, and no
apprehension is felt as to future outbursts. One has a hot mudpool at
the bottom; a second spits steam from many cracks and blow-holes; a
third, the largest of all, erupted slightly in August 1904, and threw a
quantity of hot mud and stones out over the top.
Waimangu Geyser itself, which is really more a volcano than a geyser,
is supposed to have been formed at the time of the eruption. It did not,
however, commence its present activity until 1900, when an enormously
high “shot” was seen by one or two explorers camping in the
neighbourhood, and the source at once investigated. It became apparent
that New Zealand, in the place of the lost Terraces, had acquired the
largest and most magnificent geyser in the whole world. The exchange is
by no means a bad one. Waimangu attracts hundreds of travellers to the
pretty little hotel planted on a cliff not far from the crater; and
those who have been fortunate enough to see the geyser play, one and
all utterly lose themselves in attempting to express the extraordinary
majesty, wonder, and terror of the sight.
The geyser is somewhat irregular in action, but generally plays every
day or so. The water in the huge basin heaves and lifts; then an
enormous cloud of steam rushes up, and then a column of black water,
charged with mud and stones, flings itself upward in repeated leaps or
“shots” through the steam, to an almost incredible height--at times as
high as fifteen hundred feet. More than a quarter of a mile in sheer
height is Waimangu’s biggest “shot.” On such occasions, the sky is
darkened by the tremendous spread of the leaping waters, the earth
trembles with the concussion, and the watching spectators, perched high
above the crater by the shelter hut, feel as though the terrors of the
Last Day itself were falling upon them, unprepared.
In the summer of 1903 two girls and a guide were killed during the
explosion of the geyser. The girls had been repeatedly warned, even
entreated, not to stand near the crater, as it was momentarily expected
to “play”; but they hovered close by the verge, anxious to secure a
photograph. Without warning, Waimangu suddenly rose and hurled itself
bodily skyward out of its bed. The enormous backfall of the boiling
water caught and swept away the luckless three, and they were carried
down the outflow valley in the flood that succeeds every eruption. When
found, the bodies were terribly mutilated, and stripped of all clothing.
The mother of the girls, standing higher up, saw the whole awful
disaster, and had to be forcibly held back from rushing into the crater,
in a wild effort to save her children. Since that melancholy day, the
geyser basin has been railed off, in such a manner that no one can
approach near enough to incur the slightest danger. Warbrick, the head
guide of the district, was present, and nearly lost his life in a daring
attempt to save the girls and the guide, who was his own brother. He
rushed into the midst of the falling stones and water, to try and drag
the luckless victims back, but was too late to save them, and narrowly
escaped being carried away himself.
Warbrick is the best-known guide in New Zealand, and a character
of considerable interest. He is a halfcaste Maori, decidedly more
intelligent than the average white man, and speaking English perfectly.
In company with a sailor, he lately made what was probably the most
daring boat-trip ever attempted on earth--nothing less than a voyage
over Waimangu’s boiling basin, undertaken with the object of sounding
the depths of the geyser. The monster often erupts without the least
warning, sending the whole contents of its huge basin bodily skyward; so
that the feat was one likely to shake the strongest nerve. Warbrick took
a lead line with him, and noted the various depths of the crater basin.
In the centre, where the great throat of the geyser opens up, no bottom
could be found. The boat came safely to shore, after some minutes spent,
in performing one of the most perilous feats ever attempted, even by a
Maori.
Visitors generally stay at the Government accommodation house near the
geyser for a day or two, on the chance of seeing a good “shot,” and they
seldom go away unrewarded. It is well worth while to cut short one’s
stay in some other place by a couple of days, to have a chance of seeing
the world’s greatest thermal wonder in full action, for Waimangu, when
playing, is the sight of a lifetime. I was not fortunate enough to see
the geyser in action, as it was undergoing a period of “sulks” at the
time of my visit; but if it had been playing as it played some weeks
after I left, nothing would have tempted me away from its neighbourhood
until I had seen an eruption.
One, of the great charms of the geyser country about Rotorua is its
absolute unlikeness to anything that can be found on the other side of
the Line. To the much-travelled wanderer, nearly all famous show-places,
after a time, display a distressing similarity. The two or three leading
types of peasant to be found on the Continent of Europe, grow familiar
by-and-by. Giuseppe of Italy is not very novel to the traveller who
still remembers Ignacio of Spain; German Wilhelm recalls Dutch
Jan; Belgian Françoise is sister to French Mathilde. As for the
“sights”--well, one waterfall is very like another, and lakes and ruined
castles pall, taken in bulk. Even if the traveller wanders further
away, he does not find much in Egypt, India, or Japan, that has not been
greatly spoiled for him beforehand, by the countless descriptions he
has heard and read ever since childhood. It seems almost as though the
illimitable flood of sight-seers, past and present, rushing through all
the famous beauty-spots of the old world, had washed away something of
their charm--as if the air about such places were drained dry of the
ozone of fresh delight which every lovely and wonderful spot should
give, leaving only an atmosphere of feeling that is stale and used-up in
the last degree.
New Zealand’s “sights,” however, are (to vary the metaphor) new gems in
a new setting. Not even the most experienced traveller can look on the
wonders of the thermal region with an eye dulled and indifferent by
other experiences, since there is hardly anything similar the whole
world over. And the setting of the gems---the strange, unfamiliar
country, oddly reversed seasons, and wild brown Maori folk, taking the
place of European peasantry, is perhaps the greatest charm of all.
For myself, the carefully revived native dances of the Maories,
performed for money, in civilised concert halls the “haka” or war
dance, done by children on the roads for pennies, and the modern native
carvings, done with English tools, which are all among the most striking
features of daily life in Rotorua, were not the real attractions of the
place. Those lay in the common features of ordinary Maori existence,
seen here, there, and everywhere, without pose or preparation. When one
strolls out along the country roads near the town, it is an adventure to
meet a party of wild-eyed, brown-faced men and women, galloping madly up
and down hill on their rough “brumbies” (wild-horses, broken in)--both
sexes alike wrapped in heavy blankets, and sitting astride. Wandering
about on a bicycle, it pleasantly increases the “go-abroady” feeling
that most travellers welcome, to coma upon a woman taking a fat fowl out
of the steam-hole cooker, that Nature has provided just at the door
of her thatch-roofed, reed-built “warry,” and to stop and talk for an
interesting quarter of an hour with a barefooted, half-clad savage, who
speaks English as good as one’s own, reads the daily papers and has his
opinions on Mr. Seddon’s fiscal policy. The Maori guides and hangers on,
about the best-known sights, are naturally more or less spoiled by the
visitors. But the real Maori, of whom one gets an occasional sight, even
about such a civilised town as Rotorua, is attractive enough to make
one fully understand the strong regard that most New Zealanders have
for their native friends. Dignity, pride, and the manners of an exiled
royalty are his natural heritage. His mind is as keen as the white,
man’s, though perhaps somewhat narrower in scope; he has a vivid sense
of humour, strong feelings about honour and faithfulness, the courage of
a bull-dog, and the reckless daring of an Irish dragoon. Worth knowing,
and well worth liking when known, are the brown men and women of North
New Zealand.
The little village of Ohinemutu, less than a mile from Rotorua, is
astonishingly Maori still, in spite of the development of the district
for tourist travel. Go down towards the shores of the lake at the back
of the big hotel, and you step at once into a native “pah,” built in the
haphazard fashion peculiar to Maori settlements. There are no streets,
and no definite beginnings or endings. The houses face every way, and
are of many fashions; here a reed-built warry, there a house with a
front splendidly carved and painted in old native fashion, further on
a wooden dwelling about as large as a bathing-box, with a full-sized
bay-window fastened on to it. Most are wooden huts with iron roofs--a
compromise between native and European styles.
Everywhere one goes, there are steaming pools with newly washed clothes
drying on the edge, or small brown bodies happily disporting themselves
in the water. Cooking-boxes are erected over countless steam-holes;
and every here and there, one meets a tall brown man or woman, looking
extremely clean and damp, and wrapped in a big coloured blanket and
nothing else, stalking house-wards from a refreshing bath. Try to take
a photograph, and if the Maori is accustomed to tourists, he will ask a
shilling for the labour of posing; but if he has recently come down from
the wilds, and is still unspoiled, he will reject an offer of coin with
quiet dignity. Taken as nature made him, the Maori is not greedy of
money. It is only a very few months since the Maories of the King
country (a wild, half-claimed district in the “back blocks”) have
allowed gold prospectors to pass through their lands. Until recently
they admitted tourists and sportsmen freely, but refused to allow any
one to look for gold, giving as a reason their belief, that the finding
of gold did no country any good.
Whakarewarewa, a couple of miles outside the town of Rotorua, has a very
interesting model of a typical Maori fortified “pah,” lately completed
by the Government. The large space of grass enclosed by the fort is
guarded by high earth breastworks and a deep ditch. Beyond the ditch is
an open wooden paling, apparently more for ornament than use, on which
are placed at intervals carved wooden figures of a threatening and
terrifying character. All of them are native work, but of modern date.
The geysers of Whakarewarewa are many and famous. The most famous of all
was the great twin geyser Waikite, whose double throat opens at the top
of a high terraced cone, built up of siliceous sinter, deposited by
the geyser water during long ages of action. Waikite has ceased to play
since 1886, when the railway from Auckland to Rotorua was completed. On
the day when the line was opened for traffic, the geyser ceased playing,
and its fountains have never ascended since.
Wairoa (Maori, “Long Water”) is now the lion of Whakarewarewa. It
plays very seldom of its own accord, but on special occasions the local
authorities permit it to be dosed with soap, which always produces an
eruption. A geyser constantly physicked in this manner often gives up
playing altogether in the end; so careful restrictions hedge round
the operation, in the case of Wairoa. It is first necessary to procure
consent from the Government Tourist Department in Wellington, and then
to arrange a day and give notice to the town. The Government authorities
in Wellington were kind enough to send an order to Rotorua to have
Wairoa soaped for me during my stay; and I took advantage of the
opportunity to enjoy the novel sensation of starting the geyser myself.
On a Sunday afternoon of December 1904, all Rotorua assembled in a black
crowd at “Whaka” to see Wairoa play. Rows of cameras were placed upon
the hillocks commanding the spot; bets were freely made about the height
and quality of the coming performance, and every one scuffled politely
for a front place when the ceremony began. The caretaker of the grounds
and the head guide solemnly removed the wooden cover (pierced to allow
the escape of steam) which is padlocked over the geyser’s stony lips,
and handed me a bag containing three bars of soap, cut up into small
pieces. I stood on the edge of the geyser-mouth, looking down a great
black well full of steam, and rumbling with deep, groaning murmurs from
below, until the guide gave the word, and then emptied the bag down
Wairoa’s throat.
[Illustration: 501]
Almost immediately, white lather began to form in the depths of the
well, and rose rapidly to the verge. The guide now ordered me away from
the geyser; for, although Wairoa generally takes some minutes to play
after being soaped, one can never be absolutely certain that it will
not respond with inconvenient swiftness. I went back to a neighbouring
hillock from which an excellent view could be obtained, and waited with
the eager crowd. Every now and then a small rush of water lifted over
the geyser rim, and once or twice the fountain seemed about to start;
but it was not until seventeen minutes after I had put in the soap
that Wairoa choked, gurgled, and finally broke into a roar like a
ten thousand ton liner throwing off steam. In another instant, still
roaring, the geyser shot up silvery white water, dissolving at the top,
full 140 feet above ground, into a crest of delicate streamy feathers
all sparkling in the sun. The display lasted about a couple of minutes,
and then sank gradually away; but for long afterwards, Wairoa mumbled
and grumbled and frothed at the mouth, not settling down into quiet for
at least an hour.
Of Auckland--“last, loneliest, loveliest, exquisite, apart,” as Kipling
has called it--thus compelling all later travellers to see, or at least
pretend to see, exquisite loveliness in prosaic Queen Street, and go
a-hunting for poetic solitudes along the quays--I have nothing to say.
Great ports are all alike, the wide world over, and hotel is as like
unto hotel as pebble unto pebble. And when the story is done, why
linger?
I have set forth to tell something of Britain of the South Seas, and
such as it is, my say has been said.
THE END
End of Project Gutenberg's In The Strange South Seas, by Beatrice Grimshaw