Page:Our New Zealand Cousins.djvu/58

 the Blue Lake—Tikitapu—home of the dreaded Taniwha (the Taniwha is the water-kelpie of the Maoris). How perfectly beautiful looks the lake, embosomed amid her surrounding craggy hills! The white gleam of this landslip from the pumice cliff, contrasts so sharply with the deep sombre shadow of the wooded dell beside. Here at our feet is a semi-circular beach of white ashes, with a lapping fringe of olive-green ripplets; and on the lake's clear bosom the breeze raises thousands of tiny wavelets, that sparkle and flash as if silver trout were chasing each other in myriads; while, at times, a gust comes sweeping through the ravines, and raises great black bars of shadow on the face of the waters.

We cross a narrow neck, and there down, down, eighty feet below, lies another larger and not less lovely sheet of water, Lake Rotokakahi, or Mussel-shell Lake. It stretches away before us, a plain of burnished silver for about four miles. It is bounded opposite to us by a buttressed, flat-topped range of steep mountains, along whose base, and skirting the lake for its entire distance, winds the road to Taupo and Napier. Away at the far end lies a small islet, like a waterfowl at rest, and yet farther away, looking soft in the blue haze of distance, beyond the low green hills that bound the farther extreme of Rotokakahi, rises a mighty crest, beneath whose ample shadow reposes another, and yet another lake. Words utterly fail to depict the magic beauty of this wondrous region.