Page:Picturesque New Zealand, 1913.djvu/135

Rh All these and much more I found in the Hot Lakes Wonderland. The Hot Lakes District has been hastily, extravagantly named. It is rather a region of cold lakes, although there is plenty of hot water in all its parts, and some of it is present in lakes, but more generally so in pools and ponds. The cause of all this thermal activity, I naturally supposed, was volcanic agencies and probably the chemical action of sulphuric acid on water. Not so, a Maori legend informed me. These volcanic fires were caused by two women, sisters of a high priest named Ngatoroirangi, who acted in his ecclesiastical capacity in the Arawa canoe on its voyage from Hawaiki to New Zealand. Ngatoroirangi and a man named Ngauruhoe ascended Tongariro Mountain, and there the priest's companion froze to death. Calling to his sisters in Hawaiki, he asked them to bring him fire. On the back of a taniwha they came, and as they journeyed they produced geysers, the first one on White Island, an active volcano in the Bay of Plenty. The fire they brought saved their brother and converted New Zealand into a steam heater. The centre of this wonderland is Rotorua, or "Rotterrua," as some careless people call it. It is one hundred and seventy-one miles by rail from Auckland, overlooking Lake Rotorua at an elevation of nine hundred and thirty-two feet above sea level, and is reached daily by express trains. Rotorua is more than the chief health and tourist resort of the Dominion. It is a Government