Page:Picturesque New Zealand, 1913.djvu/164

 100 the water simmer; and no wonder, for Hell's Gate has a temperature of two hundred and thirty-two degrees.

Hell's Gate looked bad enough, but the Inferno was more ferocious still. To reach it I crossed Frying-Pan Creek, a tiny stream running for a short distance over a perforated, seething floor. The Inferno was one of the ugliest and most violent thermal products imaginable. It was a long, irregular basin of splashing mud and ill-smelling steam; its walls, varying in height from a few inches to six or seven feet, were stained with a mixture of mud and oil; its convulsions were so furious that I heard its splashings yards from its rim. Almost as fearful in appearance, but smaller, was Satan's Glory. It was very noisy and busy, and strewn with large bubbles and broken by splashers. Near it the ground trembled. Close by was the Mouth of Hades, an opening in a silica ledge, below which was a dark, splashing basin of mud; and from the floor of the aperture alum oozed. Connected with Satan's Glory was the Porridge-Pot, containing a boiling mixture of oil and fuller's-earth. In the same reserve and in other parts of the Hot Lakes district are similar deposits of clay.

Tikitere is more than a weird spectacle. It is also a sombre sanatorium. In its springs and mud baths people are cured of rheumatism, lumbago, skin diseases, muscular ailments, paralysis, and other diseases. One of the strongest properties of its medicated waters is sulphuric acid.