The Countess of Glasgow herself told me about the cure of a certain colonel relative or aide-de-camp of the Governor, the Earl of Glasgow. The Colonel had for years been a perfect martyr to rheumatism and gout. He went to Rotorua with his swollen legs and feet, and came away wearing tight boots, and “as good as ever,” as my guide would have said. But indeed I heard of scores of similar cases. Let all victims who can afford it lay it well to heart. A pleasure trip, of only thirty-two days, changing saloon rail carriage but three times, and steamer cabins but twice, will insure them an almost infallible cure, even when chronically diseased and no longer young. This is no “jeujah” affair. I have seen and spoken to the fortunate beneficiares—you meet them all over New Zealand. Of course, the fame of the baths is spreading: the region is only just made accessible by the opening of the railway from Auckland to Rotorua—a ten hours’ run. The Waikari and Taupo baths are very similar, and the situation is infinitely more romantic, but the Government, on account of the railway, are pushing the Rotorua baths.
I stole out about half-past ten at night; it was clear and frosty. I made my way to a warm lake at the bottom of the hotel grounds, a little shed and a tallow candle being the only accommodation provided. Anything more weird than that starlight bath I never experienced. I stepped in the deep night from the frosty bank into a temperature of about 80°.
It was a large shallow lake. I peered into the dark, but I could not see its extent by the dim starlight; no, not even the opposite banks. I swam about until I came to the margin—a mossy, soft margin. Dark branches of trees dipped in the water, and I could feel the fallen leaves floating about. I followed the margin round till the light in my wood cabin dwindled to a mere spark in the distance, then I swam out into the middle of the lake. When I was upright the warm water reached my chin; beneath my feet seemed to be fine sand and gravel. Then leaning my head back I looked up at the Milky Way, and all the expanse of the starlit heavens. There was not a sound; the great suns and planets hung like golden balls above me in the clear air. The star dust of planetary systems—whole universes—stretched away bewilderingly into the unutterable void of boundless immensity, mapping out here and there the trackless thoroughfares of God in the midnight skies. “Dont la poussière,” as Lamartine finely writes in oft-plagiarised words, “sont les Étoiles qui remontent et tombent devant Lui.”
How long I remained there absorbed in this super-mundane contemplation I cannot say. I felt myself embraced simultaneously by three elements—the warm water, the darkness, and the starlit air. They wove a threefold spell about my senses, whilst my intellect seemed detached, free. Emancipated from earthly trammels, I seemed mounting up and up towards the stars. Suddenly I found myself growing faint, luxuriously faint. My head sank back, my eyes closed, there was a humming as of some distant waterfall in my ears. I seemed falling asleep, pillowed on the warm water, but common sense rescued me just in time. I was alone in an unknown hot lake in New Zealand at night, out of reach of human call. I roused myself with a great effort of will. I had only just time to make for the bank when I grew quite dizzy. The keen frosty air brought me unpleasantly to my senses. My tallow dip was guttering in its socket, and hastily resuming my garments, in a somewhat shivering condition, I retraced the rocky path, then groped my way over the little bridge under which rushed the hot stream that fed the lakelet, and guided only by the dim starlight I regained my hotel.
I had often looked up at the midnight skies before—at Charles’s Wain and the Pleiades on the Atlantic, at the Southern Cross on the Pacific, and the resplendent Milky Way in the Tropics, at Mars and his so-called canals, at “the opal widths of the moon” from the snowy top of Mount Cenis, but never, no, never had I studied astronomy under such extraordinary circumstances and with such peculiar and enchanted environments as on this night at the Waikari hot springs.
Travel and Talk (London and New York, 1896).
THE BIG TREES OF CALIFORNIA
(UNITED STATES)
C. F. GORDON-CUMMING
At last we entered the true forest-belt, and anything more beautiful you cannot conceive. We forgot our bumps and bruises in sheer delight. Oh the loveliness of those pines and cedars, living or dead! For the dead trees are draped with the most exquisite golden-green lichen, which hangs in festoons many yards in length, and is unlike any other moss or lichen I ever saw. I can compare it to nothing but gleams of sunshine in the dark forest. Then, too, how beautiful are the long arcades of stately columns, red, yellow, or brown, 200 feet in height, and straight as an arrow, losing themselves in their own crown of misty green foliage; and some standing solitary, dead and sunbleached, telling of careless fires, which burnt away their hearts, but could not make them fall!