Page:Picturesque New Zealand, 1913.djvu/181

Rh creeks, and in its siliceous depths are hot baths, colored pools, geysers, sulphur pits and caves, alum cliffs, and a beautiful sinter terrace. The most conspicuous of its wonders is Rainbow Mountain, twenty-five hundred feet high, and composed largely of red and white clay with shades of pink, purple, yellow, and gray, produced by hydro-thermal action. In its slopes are crater hollows with warm springs in their bottoms, and high on its cliffs are steaming funnels. West of it is noisy Mount Maungaongaonga and its powerful blowhole. When very active, this steam outlet can be heard for half a mile. South of Maungaongaonga is Paeroa, another mountain with a heated base; below it is a boiling fountain and a hot stream. Waiotapu is seen at its best in the early morning, and especially on a frosty one. Steam columns ascend in every part of the vale. There appear to be hundreds of them, lazily rising like fog on a swamp. It is as if a thousand subterranean boilers were discharging their steam through innumerable surface valves.

To the midday traveler the only object of particular interest on nearing the valley's hotel is the Giant Porridge-Pot, a huge mound of splashing mud. It is the largest mud "volcano" in the thermal district, its height above the road being ten or twelve feet, and its active part, from which mud is often hurled several yards, about twenty feet in diameter. The valley's most interesting part is the Maori Reserve, a white, barren spot opposite to the hotel. The