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.
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.”