Page:Picturesque New Zealand, 1913.djvu/210

134 forming, I was told, at the rate of one inch in ninety years. Here were formations, pure white and varicolored, more delicately wrought than coral; and brown, yellow, and white shapes resembling carrots and parsnips. In one respect Waitomo was the reverse of Ruakuri. Waitomo was beautiful at the beginning and weird at the end. As soon as Waitomo's door was opened, a white grotto, encrusted, and fit for the chamber of a fairy princess, was revealed. For my visit to Waitomo I had chosen the most impressive hour, nightfall. At that hour there was awesome and mysterious suggestiveness in the preparations and in the approach to the cave's mouth. As the cave-seekers neared Waitomo in single file beneath the trees that darkened the entrance, moonshiners, night-riders, and ghosts were suggested in the low voices, the crouching figures, the cautious tread, and the gloom of shadows. The supreme architectural feature of this cave was the Cathedral, which had a ceiling sixty feet high. Both ceiling and walls were elaborately decorated, and in the main room a fair-sized congregation could have assembled for worship. In Waitomo, too, were the Organ and the Jew's-Harp, each possessing stalactites that, when struck, produced music something like that of a steam calliope. In the Court-Room fancy had formed from limestone a judge, jury, counsel, and prisoners. Near here,