Page:Our New Zealand Cousins.djvu/72

 mud in incessant motion. It rises up in great circling domes and plastic cupolas, which seethe, and expand, and swell, and then break with a lazy, hissing, escape of steam; and the mass falls back and collapses, and heaves up and down with an unctuous horribleness. Sometimes a big spout rises up nearly to the outside rim of the deep hole, and then falls back with a sullen, vicious flop, as if some slimy spirit, there imprisoned, were angry and baffled at not being able to reach us, and smirch and scald us.

Here is the Coffee Pot, not inaptly named, if one looks at the brown liquid, swirling around, with an oily, dirty scum circling in endless eddies on the surface.

Behind us, as we glance around, the whole hillside, for many acres, smokes and steams, and as the sun is glinting on it, the effect is indescribably lovely, as contrasted with the sullen mudholes into which we have been peering. The light fleecy wreaths of steam take on all sorts of rainbow tints from the sun, and curl gracefully aloft, like an army of cobwebs floating across a lawn on some sunny morning in spring.

There are now many extinct cones in this valley and yet all the sights and sounds' have a weird, uncanny suggestiveness. Poke your stick through the thin crust, and steam issues forth. Every cranny and fissure is steaming and hot, and the whole mountain is undoubtedly a hotbed of combustion.

The Devil's Hole, we hear roaring behind these