Page:Our New Zealand Cousins.djvu/73

 tumbled crags and smouldering cliffs. What a hoarse gasping! It sounds indeed as if Apollyon chained down below was being choked by the dogs of Cerberus, and that their snarling and his wrathful choking roar were being listened to by awe-stricken mortals. The wonders here again are "legion"—the Green Lake, the gypsum slabs; the Porridge-Pot, of which we taste, and exchange experiences.

One says, "it is acid."

Another says, "it is tasteless."

Yet another, "it is sweet."

Yet one more, "it tastes like ink."

I vow it "tastes like melted slate pencil," and we all agree that that is about as correct a definition as we can arrive at. The Maoris, we are told, frequently eat it in large quantities.

We climb next a white rocky eminence, and get a peep over the lake at the Pink Terraces on the far side with their circling canopy of steam.

We pass more scaly white efflorescences amid the scrub, gaze upon another active geyser with an unspellable name, wonder at the gurly blackness of "The Ink-Pot" in a state of frantic ebullition, and again dive into the thick scrub.

Here all is solemnly still. The earth shakes beneath us. We are walking over vast caverns of boiling mud and pent-up steam, and sometimes as we pass a crevice we can hear the boiling waters swishing and sighing restlessly far, far below.

The Devil's Wife was the next sensation, "and an angry wife was she," as the old song says.