Page:Picturesque New Zealand, 1913.djvu/168

 hundred feet deep, and with a maximum width of one and a half miles.

Soon after Tarawera erupted, Lake Rotomahana, two thousand feet below Tarawera's summit, became active. At that time it was a warm body of water, with a thermal, swampy margin, one hundred and eighty-five acres in area, and it discharged into Lake Tarawera, a mile distant. Now Rotomahana is thirty times larger, and its outlet to Tarawera is blocked. Rotomahana is still, as it was then, a discolored lake, and it is completely surrounded with dreary looking mud cliffs, the barrenness of which is relieved only by the waving plumes of the toitoi (pampas grass).

It was not always thus. Under these cliffs lie the White and Pink Terraces, the most beautiful objects of New Zealand's thermal regions before the lake they had overlooked buried them. There they are to-day, shattered and irrecoverable, according to some investigators; entire and little damaged, according to others who are more hopeful than positive. These terraces were high, wide rippled stairways of sinter, smooth and hard. In places they swelled out as umbrella buttresses. In their floors were warm baths, into which tourists and resident Maoris delighted to plunge; over them hung clouds of steam, and under them raged a heat that I found still strongly evident on the site of Pink Terrace.

The White Terrace had a fountain of azure-blue hot water ninety feet in diameter, which sometimes spouted ten or fifteen feet high. When the south wind blew