Page:Our New Zealand Cousins.djvu/66

 clouds, and we are informed, "There lie the Terraces!"

The dream of years is about to be realized. Hastily disembarking, leaving the weaker and aged members of the party to be poled up the swift creek in canoes, we put on our sand-shoes, tramp along in Indian file through the tall manukau scrub. Kate's stalwart figure leads the way, with free swinging gait and elastic tread.

After a walk through the bracken of about a mile, we top a ridge, and at our feet lies the wonder of the world that has brought us so far. In the hollow flows the swift clear stream, up which we see the Maoris poling the canoes, with our friends seated very comfortably therein. On the left glistens the cold lake, steely and still. On the right gleams Rotomahana, the hot lake, with its sedgy shallows, its reeking, steaming margin, its two floating islands, and its winged hosts of waterfowl.

Right in front, spread out like a snowy cloud dropped from the heavens—rising to its fleecy frosted source, in the black, burnt bosom of the hill—billowing over in countless crested cascades of alabaster-like purity and marble whiteness; by terraced gradations, each one a gemmed chalice or fretted basin of purest white, the famous terraces of Rotomahana confront us!

We plod over a slushy courtyard as it were, and then reverently and softly, as if in the precincts of a sacred shrine, a silence having settled on our whole party, we mount those pearly stairs of exceeding loveliness.