Page:Rambles in New Zealand.djvu/42

. The natives cook all their food in the streams of hot water, by putting it into a basket and letting the water flow through it; it does not at all injure the flavour of the vegetables, but I never tasted any meat so cooked. The whole of the ground about the great Pa is full of springs and holes from which steam escapes, so that great caution is required in walking about, as a false step might sink you to your middle in boiling mud. The sites of the springs are constantly changing; and a place which to-day is quite hard, may to-morrow break in when trodden upon. Deaths arising from accidents of this kind are very frequent—the whole ground is so hot that the insides of the native huts are hardly bearable, and must, I think, be very unwholesome. There was plenty of very fine tobacco growing near, although I never at any other place met with any that was worth gathering. I saw here, for the first time, a chief fed by a woman—not being able to feed himself because he was tabooed: it had a most ridiculous appearance to see a full-grown man fed like a child with pap. The food was in a calabash, and pushed by the woman's fingers to the edge, so that it should fall into his mouth. About a mile from the Pa, are a number of mud volcanoes (if they may be so called), consisting of hollows, varying from fifty to one hundred and fifty feet across, filled with mud, about the consistence in general of peasoup. This mud is constantly bubbling, and making a most curious noise; in some of the holes there have been formed cones of mud about ten feet high; in these places it is of a somewhat thicker consistence, and I suppose the bubbles always escape at the same places. The mud is not hot, and the water which drains off is very nauseous, quite different in taste from that of the hot springs, which might be drunk on an emergency. There is about a square mile covered with these mud-springs, the paths between the hollows not being more in many instances