Page:Travel letters from New Zealand, Australia and Africa (1913).djvu/88

 which steam pours constantly, and with a great noise. This is called the safety-valve of New Zealand. Surrounding it we found a number of empty four-gallon oil tins; cans in which old Rockefeller had shipped gasoline to this country. The driver of our carriage threw these cans into the blow-hole, and the steam shot them out again. The noise reminded me of steam being blown out of a locomotive boiler, in preparation for washing it. There are no hot springs or geysers within four or five miles of the Blow Hole; it is a solitary attraction, and the steam ascending from it may be seen many miles Although the big terraces were covered up by the earthquake of 1886, we have seen two or three small and imperfect ones. As you walk through the Wairakei valley you notice that the earth is red, and green, and yellow, and white, and blue in places. The guide gave me a card on which he had made many colors with mud; it reminded me of a painter's color-card. All this is like the Yellowstone, and everything here is much like the geyser fields in our greatest national park, but it seems to me that the Yellowstone is much superior, in every way. Facilities for getting about are much the same, and prices about the same, but the hotel accommodations in the Yellowstone are undoubtedly better At one place in Wairakei valley, steam pours out of a number of small holes in the earth. Bottles are placed beside the steam holes in such a way that an incessant whistling is kept up, in half a dozen different keys. At another place, what sounds like cannonading may be heard deep in the earth; in another, at the bottom of a lake, you may hear what sounds like a blacksmith ham