Page:Our New Zealand Cousins.djvu/74

 What a grumbling, spitting, fiendish vixen she must be, if she is at all like this spuming, growling hole. Close by is a vast dried-up gulf of slaty mud,—at least, it was so when we saw it. It is uneuphemistically named The Bellyache, and at times we are told the moans and outcries are supernaturally terrible. It only indulged in one unearthly groan while we were there; but that was enough to startle us all, and make us hurry from the spot.

There are vast deposits of gypsum and sulphur here, and possibly as the central fires "slow down" and cool off, and when the railway comes with its utilitarian matter-of-fact presence, some speculators unless restrained will mar the poetry of this spot of marvels, and turn the glories of the place into pounds, shillings, and pence.

Here we come to warm caves and terraces of broad flagstones, where Maoris once lived. Moko's Cave is a natural Turkish bath, where I forget how many generations Kate said were born and reared. They must have had a hot time of it. The fires are burning out this side the hill, surely. Here is a deserted terrace, now getting cold and moss-grown. Below it, and near the lake, is a boiling pool of some extent, and of an exquisite deep blue, in which a poor Maori nurse-girl and her charge—a helpless infant—were boiled. The bodies were never recovered. Did the gnomes of the hill have a cannibal broth, we wonder? The cauldron is named after the poor girl, Ruakini, and it is forming a white terrace here on a small