“Yes.”
“Arn’t it good?”
“Glorious!”
“I thought they was going to scald me like a pig, so as to eat me afterwards. Did you hear me holler?”
“Hear you? Yes.—How delicious and restful it feels.”
“Ah, it do, my lad; but don’t you let any on it get into your mouth. I did, and arn’t good. But I say; what’s it mean? Seems so rum to me coming to meet us in a canoe and bringing us ashore, and giving us hot baths. I don’t seem to understand it. Nobody does such things over at home.”
As they lay in the roughly-made stone slab baths, into which the volcanic water effervesced and gurgled, the followers of Ngati came and went busily, and a curious transformation came over the scene—the darkness seemed to undergo a change and become grey. Then as Don watched, he saw that above his head quite a cloud of steam was floating, through which a pale, sad light began to penetrate; and as he watched this, so pleasant and restful was the sensation that he felt as if he could sleep, till he took into consideration the fact that if he did, his body would become relaxed, and he would slip down with his head beneath the surface.
As it grew lighter rapidly now, he could make out that the roughly thatched roof was merely stretched over a rough rocky nook in which the hot spring bubbled out of the mountain slope, and here a few rough slabs had been laid together, box-fashion, to retain the water and form the bath.
Before he had more than realised the fact that Jem was in a shelter very similar to his own, the huge New Zealander was back with about a dozen of his men, and himself bearing a great native flax cloth marked with a broad pattern.
Just as the sun had transformed everything without, and Don was gazing on a glorious prospect of lace-like tree-fern rising out of the steaming gully in which he stood, Jem Wimble came stalking out of the shelter where he had been dressing—a very simple operation, for it had consisted in draping himself in a great unbleached cloth—and looking squat and comical as a man in his circumstances could look.