Page images
PDF
EPUB
[merged small][merged small][graphic][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small]
[graphic]

COLOSSAL GEYSER OF WAIMANGU IN VIOLENT ERUPTION.

Some of its jets are 500 feet high, and the same in diameter. The Maoris actually cook their food in this weird wilderness of boiling water.

Wonders of New Zealand

By W. G. Fitz-Gerald

[graphic]

EW ZEALAND is a kind of Utopian colony where women vote and poverty is unknown. It is firstly a pastoral, and secondly an agricultural country. But

it is mainly remarkable to the outsider for its most curious aboriginal race-the Maoris whose origin has been. lost in the obscurity enveloping a people without letters; and for the thermal "wonderland" of North Island, where a vast region has been set apart by the Government for all time as a sanatorium for invalids.

This region abounds in volcanoes, many of them over 6,000 feet high, whose crater-lips emit steam, vapors, and poisonous gases. Perhaps the most remarkable feature of New Zealand's thermal country is Mount Ruapehu, over 9,000 feet high, with a steaming craterlake on its summit. In March, 1895, an eruption took place, forming a few hot springs on the lake's margin, and increasing the heat in the lake itself. I have never seen elsewhere anything like Lake Ruapehu. It lies at the bottom of a funnel-shaped crater whose perpendicular sides are mantled with snow and ice.

The water occupies a basin 500 feet in diameter, and 300 feet deep, and is quite inaccessible except when ropes are used. As to the hot springs of the Thermal Zone, these stretch for nearly 300 miles, but are most active in the neighborhood of Lake Rotorua. This wonderful district is forever changing its face, and on the tenth of June, 1886, lost its most beautiful feature during an eruption of Mount Tarawera, when the famous Pink and White Terraces were destroyed, together with Lake Rotomahana.

There is a volcanic belt here about twenty miles wide, made up of smoking mountains, warm lakes, solfataras, boiling geysers, and innumerable thermal springs of singular beauty and extraordinary curative value, which are now attracting health and pleasure seekers from every part of the world.

What may be called the threshold of the Hot Springs region, is the Maori village of Toka-anu. village of Toka-anu. For at least one square mile in the vicinity of the hotel, abound springs, ranging from warm water to water at boiling point. There are beautiful, simmering pools of limpid blue, edged with snow-white rims; black holes of spluttering mud; boiling fountains hissing and foaming, and making natural cooking-pots for the Maori

women.

The visitor is amazed to behold his first spouting geyser with an enormous vent shooting its ever-boiling water five hundred feet into the air in a foaming, snow-white dome of steaming water, which affords a weird contrast with the flesh-tinted edges of its crater. Close by is a spring that petrifies everything put into it. These springs seem to be connected in some way; and, as one goes from one to the other among the thickgrowing manuka scrub, one notices that this one will empty and cool, as that fills and boils.

Naturally one requires a guide in this strange region, and for this purpose Maori maidens of singular beauty are employed to steer the visitor round the innumerable geysers, "porridge pots," mud-holes that for ever boil, and exploding pools. A couple of miles from Tokaanu, lies Mount Kakaramea, an old volcano whose entire north side appears to have been boiled soft by steam from the bowels of the earth, so that it is on the point of collapse. Its summit is brilliant

red in hue, and every stone is decomposed into reddish clay; while from every crack and cleft hot steam and boiling water are streaming out with palpitations, as though hundreds of steam engines were in action.

It is at the very foot of this slope that one dark night the Maori village of Te Rapa was entirely buried under a hideous

THE CHAMPAGNE GEYSER.

In the steaming valley of Wairakei, with its many-colored terraces and boiling springs.

avalanche of steaming mud. All the natives perished, together with their chief, the renowned Te Heuheu, and all his family.

The village of Toka-anu makes an excellent headquarters for exploring the Tongariro group, which sits in majesty on a huge flat cone near the center of the North Island, some two thousand feet above sea-level. The group consists of the colossal pile of Ruapehu, and the whole volcanic mass of Tongariro. On the southwestern side is the ever-smoking peak of Ngauruhoe, often throwing out hot stones and ashes with explosions worthy of Vesuvius herself, and lighting by night the lovely face of Lake Taupo. The walls of this crater are beautifully

encrusted with dazzling sulphur crystals, shot with opalescent shades of red.

Another active crater close by-Te Mari-and the hot springs of Ketetahi, are comparatively easy of access. At the latter, one realizes one is indeed in the very heart of New Zealand's "wonderland." We are at the mouth of a bottomless pit, and above us towers the great mountain. The ground for five acres around us is almost burning hot-soft and treacherous, too. It is made up of decomposed basalt with red, white, and pink clay, fused with sulphur. A choking odor of burning brimstone fills the air. The ground is quaking and cracking from the great heat; and from these cracks steam is gushing, making as far as we can see a seething, hissing pandemonium, leaping in jets with unearthly shrieks of fury.

Now and then boiling water is shot to a great height, accompanied with stones and mud. There are sulphur baths here, too, known the world over as a sovereign remedy for rheumatism. From the summit of Tongariro, the view is indeed a surprise; for, instead of barren wastes, as one might suppose, one looks upon a landscape of gorgeous luxuriance-wide plains, silvery rivers, densely-wooded gorges, snow-capped mountains, and everywhere the scarlet mistletoe of New Zealand hanging in great clusters from the beech trees.

Not far away is Lake Taupo, the road thence passing through a gorge of vertical cliffs, snow-white in hue, and freaked with red. There is a fleet of boats on the lake; but again the most interesting feature is the series of sulphur springs, which in this region it seems impossible to avoid. In one place will be found a number of hillocks of fantastic hue, at whose feet are innumerable pits of sulphurous mud scattered over many acres of red earth, ranging in shade from pale pink to richest crimson.

Here, again, the ground is soft and treacherous, and hissings and splutterings are heard as the mud bubbles and boils. Very terrible accidents have happened at this place.

I have but little space in which to deal with the most remarkable spouting geysers of this region, but mention must be

[graphic]
[graphic]

made at least of the Dev-
il's Trumpet-a round
hole in an enormous old
mud caldron, from which
issue, with roaring and
hissing, streams of steam
and water at such high
pressure that heavy
branches of trees thrown
into the hole are shot
upwards thirty or forty
feet. The column of
steam is visible fifteen or
twenty miles away. A
terrifying region indeed,
clothed with steam, and
assailing the ear with
growls and hisses-the
"flop-flop" of boiling mud-porridge and
the growl and swish of columns of boil-
ing water shot to incredible heights!

A "SHOT" 700 FEET HIGH FROM GIANT WAIMANGU GEYSER NEAR ROTORNA.

Then there are the great Wairakei geyser, the Champagne caldron, the Fairy Baths, the Dragon's Mouth-which last throws rosy red water from "jaws" of salmon pink. There are geysers with coal-black basins, boiling springs of milkwhite water, and strange volcanic rocks

resplendent with a riot of brilliant purple and golden yellow.

All these places are provided with elaborately fitted baths, and excellent hotels filled with health-seekers hailing from every nation of the Old World, as well as from our own country, and even from remote South American nations like Paraguay, Venezuela, Chile, and Peru.

[blocks in formation]
« PreviousContinue »