Page:Picturesque New Zealand, 1913.djvu/209

Rh been known to the Maoris for generations; but not by them were the caves explored. They ventured to bury some of their dead in recesses near the entrance to Ruakuri, but into Ruakuri's blackness they no more than peered.

As for us who came after, doubly fortified with candle and magnesium wire to search this abode of ghostliness, vengeful sprites and spirits troubled us not, and the forbidding darkness glowed and flashed with beauty. At its entrance Ruakuri, a series of fissures and grottoes with a maximum length of three fourths of a mile, was narrow, dismal, and commonplace. A few hundred yards from its mouth the crevice widened, and here the magnesium light flared upon the "cauliflowers" and "mushrooms" and "Queen Alexandra's Drawing-Room." Just beyond these I heard splashing water; somewhere in the blackness was a hidden waterfall.

Retracing, and proceeding up another fissure, I saw, well ahead, a sparkle. It looked like a star in a black sky; but soon I saw another like it, then a half-dozen, a score, fifty, a hundred.

"What are they?" the guide was asked. "They may be diamonds," he replied, with a grin.

Of course they were not; they were glowworms, of which more later. In the Throne Room, in Rouen Cathedral, in the Coral Cave, and before the Wedding Cake, we saw stalactites and stalagmites of wonderful construction. Here were long, slender tubes that looked like glass,