A fourth version of the legend is contained in a paper by Mr. H. Hill in vol. xxiv. of the Transactions of the N.Z. Institute.
Needless to say, the scenes between Ruapehu and the sea-coast are not all as terrific as this. The main charm of the volcanic province is, indeed, its variety. Though in a sense its inhabitants live on the lid of a boiler—a boiler, too, that is perforated with steam holes—still it is a lid between five thousand and six thousand square miles in size. This leaves ample room for broad tracts where peace reigns amid apparent solidity and security. Though it is commonly called the Hot Lakes District, none of its larger lakes are really hot, that is to say hot throughout; they are distinctly cold. Roto-mahana before it was blown up in the eruption of 1886 was in no part less than lukewarm; but in those days Roto-mahana only covered 185 acres. At Ohinemutu there is a pool the water of which is unmistakably hot throughout; but it is not more than about a hundred yards long. Usually the hot lagoons are patchy in temperature—boiling at one end, cool at the other. Perhaps the official title, Thermal Springs District, is more accurate. The hot water comes in the form of springs, spouts, and geysers. Boiling pools there are in numbers, veritable cauldrons. Boiling springs burst up on the beaches of the cold lakes, or bubble up through the chilly waters. The bather can lie floating, as the writer has, with his feet in hot and his head in cold water. Very agreeable the sensation is as the sunshine pours from a blue sky on to a lagoon fringed with ferns and green foliage. There are places where the pedestrian fording a river may feel his legs chilled to the marrow by the swift current, and yet find the sandy bottom on which he is treading almost burn the soles of his feet. The first white traveller to describe the thermal springs noted a cold cascade falling on an orifice from which steam was puffing at intervals. The resultant noise was as strange as the sight. So do hot and cold mingle and come into conflict in the thermal territory.
“THE DRAGON’S MOUTH”
The area of this hydro-thermal district, which Mr. Percy Smith, the best living authority on the subject, calls the Taupo volcanic zone, is roundly about six thousand square miles. As already said, part of it lies under the sea, above which only White Island, Mayor Island, and Whale Island rise to view. Its shape, if we could see the whole of it, would probably be a narrow oval, like an old-fashioned silver hand-mirror with a slender handle. In the handle two active volcanoes lift their heads—Ruapehu, and Tongariro with its three cones. At the other end of the mirror White Island stands up, incessantly at work. This exhausts the list of active volcanoes; but there are six or seven extinct or quiescent volcanoes of first-class importance. Mayor Island, in the Bay of Plenty, is a dead crater rimmed by walls five miles round and nearly 1300 feet high, enclosing a terrible chasm lined with dark obsidian. Mount Edgecombe, an admirably regular cone, easily seen from the coast, has two craters in its summit; and the most appalling explosion ever known in the country occurred in the tract covered by Mount Tarawera and the Roto-mahana Lake. How terrific were the forces displayed by these extinct volcanoes in ages past may be judged by the vast extent of country overlaid by the pumice and volcanic clay belched forth from their craters. Not only is the volcanic zone generally overspread with this, only sparse patches escaping, but pumice is found outside its limits. Within these, it is, loosely speaking, pumice, pumice everywhere, dry, gritty, and useless,—a thin scattering of pumice on the hill-tops and steep slopes,—deep strata of pumice where it has been washed down into valleys and river terraces. Mingled with good soil it is mischievous, though two or three grasses, notably that called Chewing’s fescue, grow well in the mixture. Unmixed pumice is porous and barren. Fortunately the tracts of deep pumice are limited. They soak up the ample rainfall; grass grows, but soon withers; in dry weather a sharp tug will drag a tussock from the roots in the loose, thirsty soil. The popular belief is that it only needs a long-continued process of stamping and rolling to make these pumice expanses hold water and become fertile. Those who think thus point out that around certain lonely lagoons, where wild horses and cattle have been wont to camp and roll, rich green patches of grass are found. Less hopeful observers hold that the destiny of the pumice country is probably to grow trees, fruit-bearing and other, whose deep roots will reach far down to the water. Already the Government, acting on this belief, has taken the work of tree-planting in hand, and millions of young saplings are to be found in the Waiotapu valley and elsewhere in the pumice land. Prison-labour is used for the purpose; and though a camp of convicts, with movable prison-vans like the cages of a travelling menagerie, seems a strange foil to the wonders of Nature, the toil is healthy for the men as well as useful to the country. From the vast extent of the pumice and clay layers it would seem that, uneasy as the thermal territory now is, it has, for all its geysers, steaming cones, and innumerable springs, become but a fretful display of slowly dying forces. So say those who look upon the great catastrophe of 1886 as merely the flicker of a dying flame.
HUKA FALLS
As already said, the volcanic zone is a land of lakes, many and beautiful. Four of the most interesting—Roto-rua, Roto-iti, Roto-ehu, and Roto-ma—lie in a chain, like pieces of silver loosely strung together. South of these Tarawera sleeps in sight of its terrible mountain, and south again of Tarawera the hot springs of Roto-mahana still draw sight-seers, though its renowned terraces are no longer there. Lake Okataina is near, resting amid unspoiled forest: and there is Roto-kakahi, the green lake, and, hard by, Tikitapu, the blue lake, beautiful by contrast. But, of course, among all the waters Taupo easily overpeers the rest. “The Sea” the Maori call it; and indeed it is so large, and its whole expanse so easily viewed at once from many heights, that it may well be taken to be greater than it is. It covers 242 square miles, but the first white travellers who saw it and wrote about it guessed it to be between three and five hundred. Hold a fair-sized map of the district with the eastern side uppermost and you will note that the shape of Taupo is that of an ass’s head with the ears laid back. This may seem an irreverent simile for the great crater lake, with its deep waters and frowning cliffs, held so sacred and mysterious by the Maori of old. Seldom is its surface flecked by any sail, and only one island of any size breaks the wide expanse. The glory of Taupo—apart from the noble view of the volcanoes southward of it—is a long rampart of cliffs that almost without a break hems in its western side mile after mile. At their highest they reach 1100 feet. So steep are they that in flood-time cascades will make a clean leap from their summits into the lake; and the sheer descent of the wall continues below the surface, for, within a boat’s length of the overhanging cliff, sounding-leads have gone down 400 feet. Many are the waterfalls which in the stormier months of the year seam the rocky faces with white thread-like courses. On a finer scale than the others are the falls called Mokau, which, dashing through a leafy cleft, pour into the deep with a sounding plunge, and, even from a distance, look something broader and stronger than the usual white riband.
By contrast, on the eastern side of the lake wide strips of beach are not uncommon, and the banks, plains, and terrace sides of whitish pumice, though not inconsiderable, are but tame when compared with the dark basaltic and trachytic heights overhanging the deep western waters. Many streams feed Taupo; only one river drains it. It is not astonishing, then, that the Maori believed that in the centre a terrible whirlpool circled round a great funnel down which water was sucked into the bowels of the earth. A variant of this legend was that a huge taniwha or saurian monster haunted the western depths, ready and willing to swallow canoes and canoemen together. The river issuing from Taupo is the Waikato, which cuts through the rocky lip of the crater-lake at its north-east corner. There it speeds away as though rejoicing to escape, with a strong clear current about two hundred yards wide. Then, pent suddenly between walls of hard rock, it is jammed into a deep rift not more than seventy feet across. Boiling and raging, the whole river shoots from the face of a steep tree-clothed cliff with something of the force of a horizontal geyser. Very beautiful is the blue and silver column as it falls, with outer edges dissolving into spray, into the broad and almost quiet expanse below. This waterfall, the Huka, though one of the famous sights of the island, does not by any means exhaust the beauties of the Upper Waikato. A little lower down the Ara-tia-tia Rapids furnish a succession of spectacles almost as fine. There for hundreds of yards the river, a writhing serpent of blue and milk-white flecked with silver, tears and zig-zags, spins and foams, among the dripping reefs and between high leafy rocks, “wild with the tumult of tumbling waters.”
Broadly speaking, the Taupo plateau is a region of long views. Cold nights are more often than not followed by sunny days. The clear and often brilliant air enables the eye to travel over the nearer plains and hills to where some far-off mountain chain almost always closes the prospect. The mountains are often forest-clad, the plains and terraces usually open. Here will be seen sheets of stunted bracken; there, wide expanses of yellowish tussock-grass. The white pumice and reddish-brown volcanic clay help to give a character to the colouring very different to the black earth and vivid green foliage of other parts of the island. The smooth glacis-like sides of the terraces, and the sharply-cut ridges of the hills, seem a fit setting for the perpetual display of volcanic forces and an adjunct in impressing on the traveller that he is in a land that has been fashioned on a strange design. Nothing in England, and very little in Europe, remotely resembles it. Only sometimes on the dusty tableland of Central Spain, in Old or New Castile, may the New Zealander be reminded of the long views and strong sunlight, or the shining slopes leading up to blue mountain ranges cutting the sky with clean lines.