IN A HOT POOL
Near a well-known lake and in a wharé so surrounded by boiling mud, scalding steam, hot water, and burning sulphur as to be difficult of approach, there lived many years ago two friends. One was a teetotaller and a deeply religious man—characteristics not universal in the Hot Lakes district at that precise epoch. The other inhabitant was more nearly normal in tastes and beliefs. The serious-minded friend became noted for having—unpaid, and with his own hands—built a chapel in the wilderness. Yet, unhappily, returning home on a thick rainy evening he slipped and fell into a boiling pool, where next day he was found—dead, of course. In vain the oldest inhabitants of the district sought to warn the survivor. He declined to be terrified, or to change either his dangerous abode or his path thereto. He persisted in walking home late at night whenever it suited him to do so. The “old hands” of the district shook their heads and prophesied that there could be but one end to such recklessness. And, sure enough, on a stormy night the genial and defiant Johnnie slipped in his turn and fell headlong into the pool which had boiled his mate. One wild shout he gave, and men who were within earshot tore to the spot—“Poor old Johnnie! Gone at last! We always said he would!” Out of the darkness and steam, however, they were greeted with a sound of vigorous splashing and of expressions couched in strong vernacular.
“Why, Johnnie man, aren’t you dead? Aren’t you boiled to death?”
“Not I! There’s no water in this —— country hot enough to boil me. Help me out!”
It appeared that the torrents of rain which had been falling had flooded a cold stream hard by, and this, overflowing into the pool, had made it pleasantly tepid.
NGONGOTAHA MOUNTAIN
Needless to say, there is one fatal event, the story of which overshadows all other stories told of the thermal zone. It is the one convulsion of Nature there, since the settlement of New Zealand, that has been great enough to become tragically famous throughout the world, apart from its interest to science. The eruption of Mount Tarawera was a magnificent and terrible spectacle. Accompanied as it was by the blowing-up of Lake Roto-mahana, it destroyed utterly the beautiful and extraordinary Pink and White Terraces. There can be no doubt that most of those who saw them thought the lost Pink and White Terraces the finest sight in the thermal region. They had not the grandeur of the volcanoes and the lakes, or the glorious energy of the geysers; but they were an astonishing combination of beauty of form and colour, of what looked like rocky massiveness with the life and heat of water in motion. Then there was nothing else of their kind on the earth at all equal to them in scale and completeness. So they could fairly be called unique, and the gazer felt on beholding them that in a sense this was the vision of a lifetime. Could those who saw them have known that the spectacle was to be so transient, this feeling must have been much keener. For how many ages they existed in the ferny wilderness, seen only by a few savages, geologists may guess at. Only for about twelve years were they the resort of any large number of civilised men. It is strange how little their fame had gone abroad before Hochstetter described them after seeing them in 1859. Bidwill, who was twice at Roto-rua in 1839, never mentions them. The naturalist Dieffenbach, who saw them in 1842, dismisses them in a paragraph, laudatory but short. George French Angas, the artist, who was the guest of Te Heu Heu in 1845, and managed, against express orders, to sketch Tongariro, does not seem to have heard of them. Yet he of all men might have been expected to get wind of such a marvel. For a marvel they were, and short as was the space during which they were known to the world, their fame must last until the Fish of Maui is engulfed in the ocean. There, amid the green manuka and rusty-green bracken, on two hill-sides sloping down to a lake of moderate size—Roto-mahana or Warm Lake,—strong boiling springs gushed out. They rose from two broad platforms, each about a hundred yards square, the flooring of craters with reddish-brown sides streaked and patched with sulphur. Their hot water, after seething and swirling in two deep pools, descended to the lake over a series of ledges, basins, or hollowed terraces, which curved out as boldly as the swelling canvas of a ship, so that the balustrades or battlements—call them what you will—seemed the segments of broken circles. Their irregular height varied from two to six feet, and visitors could scale them, as in Egypt they climb the pyramids. One terrace, or rather set of terraces, was called White, the other Pink: but the White were tinged lightly with pink in spots, and their rosy sisters paled here and there, so as to become nearly colourless in places. “White,” moreover, scarcely conveys the exact impression of Te Tarata, except from a distance or under strong light. Domett’s “cataract of marble” summed it up finely. But to be precise, where it was smoothest and where water and the play of light made the surface gleam or glisten, the silica coating of the White ledges reminded you rather of old ivory, or polished bone tinted a faint yellow. As for the “Pink” staircase, one traveller would describe it as bright salmon-pink, another as pale rose, for eyes in different heads see the same things differently. The White Terrace was the higher of the two, and descended with a gentler slope than the other. The skirts of both spread out into the lake, so that its waters flowed over them. The number and fine succession of these ivory arcs and rosy battlements made but half their charm. The hot water as it trickled from shelf to shelf left its flinty sediment in delicate incrustations—here like the folds of a mantle, there resembling fringing lace-work, milk outpoured and frozen, trailing parasites or wild arabesques. Or it made you think of wreathed sea-foam, snow half-melted, or the coral of South Sea reefs. Then among it lay the blue pools, pool after pool, warm, richly coloured, glowing; while over every edge and step fell the water, trickling, spurting, sparkling, and steaming as it slowly cooled on its downward way. So that, though there was a haunting reminder of human architecture and sculpture, there was none of the smug finish of man’s buildings, nothing of the cold dead lifelessness of carved stone-work. The sun shone upon it, the wind played with the water-drops. The blue sky—pale by contrast—overarched the deeper blue of the pools. Green mosses and vivid ferns grew and flourished on the very edge of the steam. What sculptor’s frieze or artist’s structure ever had such a framework? In the genial water the bathers, choosing their temperature, could float or sit, breathing unconfined air and wondering at the softness and strange intensity of colour. They could bathe in the day-time when all was sunshine, or on summer nights when the moonlight turned the ledges to alabaster. Did the tribute of his provinces build for Caracalla such imperial baths as these? No wonder that Nature, after showing such loveliness to our age for a moment, snatched it away from the desecration of scribbling, defacing, civilised men!
The eruption of Tarawera was preceded by many signs of disturbance. Science in chronicling them seems to turn gossip and collect portents with the gusto of Plutarch or Froissart. The calamity came on the 10th of June, and therefore in early winter. The weather had been stormy but had cleared, so no warning could be extracted from its behaviour. But, six months before, the cauldron on the uppermost platform of Te Tarata had broken out in strange fashion. Again and again the water had shrunk far down, and had even been sucked in to the supplying pipe, leaving the boiling pit, thirty yards across and as many feet deep, quite dry. Then suddenly the water had boiled up and a geyser, a mounting column or dome many feet in thickness, had shot up into the air, struggling aloft to the height of a hundred and fifty feet. From it there went up a pillar of steam four or five times as high, with a sound heard far and wide. Geyser-like as the action of the terrace-pool had been, nothing on this scale had been recorded before. Then from the Bay of Plenty came the news that thousands of dead fish had been cast up on the beaches, poisoned by the fumes of some submarine explosion. Furthermore, the crater-lake in White Island suddenly went dry—another novelty. Next, keen-eyed observers saw steam issuing from the top of Ruapehu. They could scarcely believe their eyes, for Ruapehu had been quiescent as far back as man’s memory went. But there was no doubt of it. Two athletic surveyors clambered up through the snows, and there, as they looked down four hundred feet on the crater-lake from the precipices that ringed it in, they saw the surface of the water lifted and shaken, and steam rising into the icy air. Later on, just before the catastrophe, the Maori by Roto-mahana lost their chief by sickness. As he lay dying some of his tribe saw a strange canoe, paddled by phantom warriors, glide across the lake and disappear. The number of men in the canoe was thirteen, and as they flitted by their shape changed and they became spirits with dogs’ heads. The tribe, struck with terror, gave up hope for their chief. He died, and his body lay not yet buried when the fatal night came. Lastly, on the day before the eruption, without apparent cause, waves rose and swept across the calm surface of Lake Tarawera, to the alarm of the last party of tourists who visited the Terrace. Dr. Ralph, one of these, noted also that soft mud had apparently just been ejected from the boiler of the Pink Terrace, and lay strewn about twenty-five yards away. He and his friends hastened away, depressed and uneasy.
No one, however, Maori or white, seriously conceived of anything like the destruction that was impending. The landlord of the Wairoa hotel grumbled at the native guide Sophia for telling of these ominous incidents. And a Maori chief, with some followers, went to camp upon two little islets in Roto-mahana lying handy for the hot bathing-pools. Why should any one expect that the flat-topped, heavy looking mountain of Tarawera would burst out like Krakatoa? True, Tarawera means “burning peak,” but the hill, and its companion Ruawahia, must have been quiescent for many hundred years. For were not trees growing in clefts near the summits with trunks as thick as the height of a tall man? Nor was there any tradition of explosions on the spot. Thirteen generations ago, said the Maori, a famous chief had been interred in or near one of the craters, and Nature had never disturbed his resting-place. The surprise, therefore, was almost complete, and only the winter season was responsible for the small number of tourists in the district on the 10th of June. It was about an hour past midnight when the convulsion began. First came slight shocks of earthquake; then noises, booming, muttering, and swelling to a roar. The shocks became sharper. Some of them seemed like strokes of a gigantic hammer striking upwards. Then, after a shock felt for fifty miles round, an enormous cloud rose above Tarawera and the mountain spouted fire, stones, and dust to the heavens. The burning crater illumined the cloud, so that it glowed like a “pillar of fire by night.” And above the glow an immense black canopy began to open out and spread for at least sixty miles, east, north-east and south-east. Seen from far off it had the shape of a monstrous mushroom. In the earlier hours of the eruption the outer edges of the mushroom shape were lit up by vivid streams and flashes of lightning, shooting upward, downward, or stabbing the dark mass with fierce sidelong thrusts. Forked bolts sped in fiery zig-zags, or ascended, rocket-fashion, to burst and fall in flaming fragments. Sounds followed them like the crackling of musketry. Brilliantly coloured, the flashes were blue, golden or orange, while some were burning bars of white that stood out, hot and distinct, across the red of the vomiting crater. But more appalling even than the cloudy canopy with its choking dust, the tempest, the rocking earth, or the glare of lightning, was the noise. After two o’clock it became an awful and unceasing roar, deafening the ears, benumbing the nerves, and bewildering the senses of the unhappy beings within the ring of death or imminent danger. It made the windows rattle in the streets of Auckland one hundred and fifty miles away, and awoke many sleepers in Nelson at a more incredible distance. And with the swelling of the roar thick darkness settled down—darkness that covered half a province for hours. Seven hours after the destruction began, settlers far away on the sea-coast to the east were eating their morning meals—if they cared to eat at all—by candle-light. To say that it was a darkness that could be felt would be to belittle its horrors absurdly—at any rate near Tarawera. For miles out from the mountain it was a darkness that smote and killed you—made up as it was of mud and fire, burning stones, and suffocating dust. Whence came the mud? Partly, no doubt, it was formed by steam acting on the volcanic dust-cloud; but, in part, it was the scattered contents of Roto-mahana—a whole lake hurled skyward, water and ooze together. With Roto-mahana went its shores, the Terraces, several neighbouring smaller lakes and many springs. Yet so tremendous was the outburst that even this wreck was not physically the chief feature of the destruction. That was the great rift, an irregular cleft, fourteen or fifteen miles long, opened across the Tarawera and its companion heights. This earth-crack, or succession of cracks, varied in depth from three hundred to nine hundred feet. To any one looking down into it from one of the hill-tops commanding it, it seemed half as deep again. It, and the surrounding black scoria cast up from its depths, soon became cold and dead; but, continuing as it did to bear the marks of the infernal fires that had filled it, the great fissure remained in after years the plainest evidence of that dark night’s work. When I had a sight of it in 1891, it was the centre of a landscape still clothed with desolation. The effect was dreary and unnatural. The deep wound looked an injury to the earth as malign as it was gigantic. It was precisely such a scene as would have suggested to a zealot of the Middle Ages a vision of the pit of damnation.