See the white stuff on which you are standing. It looks like salt. You have passed out of the sulphur fields and are now on hills of snow, which glisten in contrast with the boiling mud about you. Pick up some of the snow or salt and taste it. How it puckers your mouth! Your lips and tongue wither as though you had bitten into a green persimmon. The stuff is neither salt nor snow. It is alum. There are bushels of it here, mixed with other minerals, and in some parts of New Zealand there are cliffs of alum and springs that flow alum water.
But let us take a look at the Inferno. We walk through a stream over a thin crust of sulphur and gaze down into a great vat twenty feet deep and so large that you could drop a native house into it. It seems to be filled with boiling paint, and as it seethes it now and then throws up a column of mud. The odour is nauseating and we give our hands to the guides and beg them to lead us away. We go out through clouds of camphor steam from the Devil’s Punch Bowl, and on into the open, where there are green hills, blue sky, and the good earth of every day.
White Island is a roaring, steaming sulphur pit, and has a lake of hot, acid water. The earth is treacherous and corrosive, and there is no sign of life except the birds of the air.
The government restaurant at Lake Taupo is designed after the typical Maori house, with its wonderfully carved columns, walls, and rafters. Such houses took years to build and were often fifty feet long.
Much of the charm of the poi dance comes from the flash and play of light fibre balls on short flax strings. The balls are swung in time to the soft crooning of the Maori women as they dance.
In the hot springs district Mother Nature helps the Maori housewife by providing outdoor fireless cookers. Vessels of food are placed over holes or in the hot pools—and that is all there is to it.