Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 15.djvu/376

 white than the upper ones, had in places large black markings on them that brought out to great advantage the contrast between their delicate pale-blue water and that of the dark-colored lake that lay at their feet.

We camped for the night close by the terrace, cooking all our provisions in one of the natural boiling springs. During the night an ill-natured rat jumped into our spring, and compelled us to seek another cooking-place for breakfast. While the Commodore and I were lying in a warm pool, smoking a last cigar before going to bed, Mr. Fproposed to join us; we warned him that the pool was very shallow, but he was not to be dissuaded. When the moon shone out from behind a cloud it revealed, as we expected, a round white island in the middle of our bath. After trying in vain to make waves big enough to cover our newly-discovered island, we induced Mr. Fto roll over; the result was very comical, but it could hardly be said to be an improvement. We found it no easy matter to get to sleep; the ground was very hot, and every now and then jets of hot steam would find their way through the thin earth-crust and parboil us and soak our blankets. All night there was the sound in our ears of boiling water, so that it was difficult to get rid of a feeling of insecurity natural to so uncanny a sleeping-place.

We began the next day with an early bath in the basins on the white terrace, beginning with the hottest we could bear, and working our way down to the cold water: mortal man surely never had a more magnificent bath-room. After breakfast we crossed the lake in canoes to the pink terrace. It is not so large as the white, but of smoother and more regular form; none of the steps are more than six feet high, so that the baths in them are all shallow, but the steps, covered with a bright salmon-pink incrustation, run more evenly right across the terrace. Some of our party, who had visited the terrace two days before, had, I am sorry to say, written their names in pencil on the smooth pink steps. The warm water, instead of washing them away, had even in so short a time covered them with a transparent film of silica, and there they will remain, along with the names of hundreds of other cockney-souled tourists, enshrined for ever. The water here is perfectly clear, and of a much deeper blue than at the other terrace; that at the top is of a splendid bright deep blue, but the steam is very white. The setting of the two terraces is quite different; the white one lies against a hill of moderate height and gentle slope, appearing from its countless jets of steam to be a hill of fire. The pink one lies against a fine bold hill some two thousand feet high, from which it runs like a steep staircase directly into the lake. They are rival beauties, both deserving many worshipers—the white one, I believe, having the most.

Some of the small mud geysers behind the white terrace were curious; they were growling, and throwing mud of every variety of color