4. Each basin with its limpid contents, more delicate and iridescent than the shades of opal, appeals to the senses as a petrologic poem. As a background you have the battlements of a craggy mountain, looming up with awe-inspiring majesty, also reminding one of natural creations which can never be obliterated from the feeblest mind. What revelations of beauty! N.B. If so disposed, the visitors may take a bath in the cerulean depths of Te Terata. (Before doing so, we privately advise him to make his will, for he will be boiled ‘as sure as eggs is eggs.’)
5. Oh! pinky white terraces where you lay in marble bows, ‘which are described as sensuous heavens.’ Oh! polished walls of alabaster and powdered silica, like the finest silver sand. In a glade, Nature has supplied a dressing-room sheltered from the luminosity of the heavenly orb.
(I undressed in a small clearing amongst almost leafless shrubs. It was wet and dirty underfoot, and open to the wind in all directions. It was even open to the gaze of our guide Sophia. The alabaster wall of the bath took so much skin off one of my knees, that for the next fortnight I had to pay my devotions standing.)
(When we had finished, Sophia had a bath.)
THE COLD LAKES.
1. By the medium of mere words it is impossible to convey an adequate idea of the grandeur—the surpassing loveliness we may say—of the enchanting and ravishing beauty of the Cold Lakes of the Southern Island. (Don’t bathe unless you can swim.)
2. When a stranger stands for the first time in the land of the mountain and flood—the home of the ice-king—all of which are within easy reach of the Cold Lakes, he is struck dumb with admiration.
3. The barren desolate grandeur of the haggard jagged pinnacles, which fringe the shore of the Cold Lakes, surpass the wildest flights of the Eastern imagination.
The everlasting snows, the culminating peaks, the primeval forests, hold him spell-bound with enchantment.
4. Lakes of enormous depth, and pinnacles of enormous height, are creations of Nature, the memory of which will never be obliterated from the feeblest mind.