Will now befall them. How the foe, tumultuous
As are the waves, will rush with spears uplifted,
And how thy people will avenge their wrongs.
No, thou art fallen; and the earth receives
Thee as its prey! But yet thy wondrous fame
Shall soar on high, resounding o’er the heavens
Loosely speaking, New Zealand is a volcanic archipelago. There are hot pools and a noted sanatorium in the Hanmer plains in the middle of the Middle Island. There are warm springs far to the north of Auckland, near Ohaeawai, where the Maori once gave our troops a beating in the early days of our race-conflict with them. Auckland itself, the queen of New Zealand towns, is almost a crater city. At any rate, it is surrounded by dead craters. You are told that from a hill-top in the suburbs you may count sixty-three volcanic cones. Two sister towns, Wellington and Christchurch, have been repeatedly taken and well shaken by Mother Earth. Old Wellington settlers will gravely remind you that some sixty years ago a man, an inoffensive German baron, lost his life in a shock there. True, he was not swallowed up or crushed by falling ruins; a mirror fell from a wall on to his head. This earthquake was followed in 1855 by another as sharp, and one of the two so alarmed a number of pioneer settlers that they embarked on shipboard to flee from so unquiet a land. Their ship, however, so the story runs, went ashore near the mouth of Wellington harbour, and they returned to remain, and, in some cases, make their fortunes. In 1888 a double shock of earthquake wrecked some feet of the cathedral spire at Christchurch, nipping off the point of it and the gilded iron cross which it sustained, so that it stood for many months looking like a broken lead-pencil. A dozen years later, Cheviot, Amuri, and Waiau were sharply shaken by an earthquake that showed scant mercy to brick chimneys and houses of the material known as cob-and-clay. Finally, in the little Kermadec islets, far to the north of Cape Maria Van Diemen, we encounter hot pools and submarine explosions, and passing seamen have noted there sheets of ejected pumice floating and forming a scum on the surface of the ocean. As might be supposed, guides and hangers-on about Roto-rua and Taupo revel in tales of hairbreadth escapes and hair-raising fatalities. Nine generations ago, say the Maori, a sudden explosion of a geyser scalded to death half the villagers of Ohinemutu. In the way of smaller mishaps you are told how, as two Maori children walked together by Roto-mahana one slipped and broke through the crust of silica into the scalding mud beneath. The other, trying to lift him out, was himself dragged in and both were boiled alive. Near Ohinemutu, three revellers, overfull of confidence and bad rum, stepped off a narrow track at night and perished together in sulphurous mud and scalding steam. At the extremity of Boiling Point a village, or part of a village, is said to have been suddenly engulfed in the waters of Roto-rua. At the southern end of Taupo there is, or was, a legend current that a large wharé filled with dancers met, in a moment, a similar fate. In one case of which I heard, that of a Maori woman, who fell into a pool of a temperature above boiling-point, a witness assured me that she did not appear to suffer pain long: the nervous system was killed by the shock. Near Roto-rua a bather with a weak heart was picked up dead. He had heedlessly plunged into a pool the fumes and chemical action of which are too strong for a weak man. And a certain young English tourist sitting in the pool nicknamed Painkiller was half-poisoned by mephitic vapour, and only saved by the quickness of a Maori guide. That was a generation ago: nowadays the traveller need run no risks. Guides and good medical advice are to be had by all who will use them. No sensible person need incur any danger whatever.
Among stories of the boiling pools the most pathetic I can recall is of a collie dog. His master, a shepherd of the Taupo plateau, stood one day on the banks of a certain cauldron idly watching the white steam curling over the bubbling surface. His well-loved dog lay stretched on the mud crust beside him. In a thoughtless moment the shepherd flung a stick into the clear blue pool. In a flash the dog had sprung after it into the water of death. Maddened by the poor creature’s yell of pain, his master rushed to the brink, mechanically tearing off his coat as he ran. In another instant he too would have flung himself to destruction. Fortunately an athletic Maori who was standing by caught the poor man round the knees, threw him on to his back and held him down till all was over with the dog.
