XVIII
TRADITION—TAMA-TE-KAPUA
Along a narrow path through the flowering manuka-shrub led Ngawai; round groaning, rolling, bursting, and steaming mud-craters wound the path, and steam hissed everywhere from out the ground—now on to the larger crater-basins full of boiling water, green, blue, white, and always wonderfully transparent. Out of the middle of the basins rose vast boiling columns out of the unmeasurable depth to the surface, there to burst, bubbling and boiling. A beautiful but terror-inspiring spectacle are these crater-pools: silent, heartless, death-bringing, boiling from all beginning—from the time that Ngatoro-i-Rangi had called them from Hawaiki by his incantations: boiling, boiling, boiling; crowned with a thin cloud of steam, framed by the dripping, overhanging manuka-bushes.
Pitiless, eternal water-graves are these dark-green boiling seas, and the everlasting gargling of the water is like a death-song of lost souls hovering over them.
Dizzily narrow now led the path between two craters. Silently steamed the large basin to the right, its neighbour gargled and bubbled. Suddenly, as if by enchantment, the gargling water disappeared, and a moment afterwards shot a majestic column of water from out of the funnel, the air filling with vast clouds of steam. The whole column then broke in itself together, roaring and splashing; the boiling water overflowed the Geyser-crater and filled the large steaming basin, which is only by a thin wall separated from the Geyser, with a fresh supply of hot water in which the Maoris and their white friends enjoy their bath, their chat, and their smoke, especially when the winds blow down from the snow-fields of the mountains.
During the night the geysers groaned and burst and splashed all around: the noises accompanied the stories of the old friend—sometimes interrupting his murmurings, and sometimes lending power and truth to his words.
