Page:Our New Zealand Cousins.djvu/80

 many. To myself personally, and, I think, to every member of our party, perhaps bar one—and his youth might have excused him—the terraces seemed like some hallowed place, some sacred spot, in which it was almost profane to speak aloud. Yet here on the exquisite enamel of these marvellously beautiful chalices, were vulgar scrawlings, as if all the devil-possessed swine of Gadara had suddenly been transported bodily here; and, afflicted with the "cacoethes scribendi," had been impelled by the archfiend himself, to deface with their hoggish hieroglyphics this masterpiece of God's handiwork in the great art gallery of nature.

You have seen those saucer-like fungi growing from the under surface of some old log in the forest?

Such, magnified many thousandfold, is the shape of the saucer-like formations of the Pink Terraces. But for the difference in tint, they are, of course, akin in shape and beauty to the White Terraces which I have already faintly endeavoured to describe.

One charm was added here, however, which was absent from the white vision over the lake. A perpetual pattering of tiny cascades, ringing like silver bells, here made melody over all the steaming pink expanse. The sun glinted on the moving mass of flowing waters, and the hillside seemed alive with rush of pearls, diamonds, and gems of refulgent lustre. A cloud steals swiftly over the face of the sky, and the effect is like a