which in perfect stillness lie,
And give an undistorted image of the sky.
Eighty feet above the warmed water of Rotomahana was the basin of Te Tarata, with wall of clay, thirty feet in height. Its length was eighty feet, its breadth sixty, and it was filled full of exquisitely clear, boiling water, as blue as the sky above the swirl of azure vapour which constantly overhung the wondrous pool.
In the depths, far below the placid surface, sounded ever the rumble and grumble of immense quantities of water on the boil, and the overflow had formed a crystal stairway, white as Parian marble, to the lake beneath. From step to step was the height of a tall man, the breadth of each platform five or six times that measure, and every shining step was an arc of the great circle of which the red-walled crater of Rotomahana was the centre. Each ledge was overhung with stalactites, pure as alabaster, and every platform held its pools of limpid, azure water of all degrees of warmth, in baths whose elegance would have charmed a Roman eye.
On the opposite side of the lake was the spring of Otaka Puarangi, its tranquil blue water confined in a basin little more than half the size of Te Tarata. Its silicious deposits used to "descend from its orifice down to the lake," and were scaled "by a marble staircase, so sharp in its outline, so regular in its construction, and so adorned with graceful borders of evergreen shrubs that it seemed as if Nature had designed it in very mockery of the skill and industry of man."
But on this side the silica was flushed to a delicate rose, and from every step pink wreaths were hung, and garlands of tinted stone, and on every platform flashed the opalescent stalactites, festooning the ledges, midway down, or dropping from azure pool to azure pool until they reached the golden solfatara[70] and the rainbowed mud.
One hour after midnight on the 10th of June, men who dwelt or sojourned in this beautiful, dangerous region were awakened by the trembling of the earth and, knowing what that portended, rushed from their houses into the open to see the Mount of Tarawera rent asunder from top to bottom, while from the gaping wound shot up a column of roaring flame, whose capital of smoke and cloud reared itself four and twenty thousand feet above the blazing crater—a beacon of misfortune four miles high.
Red lightning played in fork and spiral about the flaming crags or sheeted the gloomy base, and many miles away from the convulsed mountain streams of fire poured upon the stricken earth. Fire-balls fell, a blazing hail, consuming whatsoever they touched, and burying beneath their increasing weight the remains of lonely hut and crowded native village.
When the pallid light of the winter dawn struggled through the dense veil of falling debris, Tarawera's mount was seen to be shivered as though smitten by the hammer of Thor; Tarawera's lake had risen forty feet, the trees beside its margin buried to their tops in volcanic mud; Tarawera's river and Rotomahana's lovely terraces were gone for ever, submerged beneath an enormous mass of ashes, mud, and stone.
For eighteen hours dust and mud fell continuously, burying fifty feet deep the entire hapu of the Matatu Maori, all save nine, and raining desolation as far as Tauranga on the Bay. Pasture land, grass and fern were burnt bare, and the same volcanic hail which slew the birds in their flight blotted out the food-supply and starved the very rats in the undergrowth.