Page:Picturesque New Zealand, 1913.djvu/155

Rh Possibly it did not like the innovation, nor the rivalry of a steam locomotive. Finally it seems to have become reconciled to the new order, for occasionally it ejects water to a height of fifty or sixty feet.

Some of the sights in New Zealand's thermal wonderland are scarcely more impressive than their names. Those most frequently heard are appellations commonly applied to nether worlds. For example, the Devil appears to have had a lot to do with the creation of the weird and the marvelous. His name is associated with mudhole and blowhole, fire and steam. An idle brain is not more "the Devil's workshop" than New Zealand appears to be. An example of this fondness for Satanic titles is furnished by the Devil's Reception, a basin of boiling mud about fifty yards in circumference. Dotted with mounds of mud from one to five feet high and with sloppy, oily pools, it constantly flings its blackness with cracking, explosive reports. So much like hopping frogs do its ejections seem to the spectator that it often is called the Frog Pond. Of the fireless cookers I saw in this reserve the one of the most historical interest was the Brain Pot, a shallow silica basin beside the main footpath. Once it had steamed like a boiling kettle; now only slight activity was visible. The Brain Pot has a tragic history. In it were cooked the brains of Chief Te Tukutuku, whose tribe had killed more than three hundred members of another iwi, Georgiana told me. After this slaughter Tukutuku fled with a slave, and for three years the two