File:Greatest wonders of the world (1906) (14769555415).jpg

Identifier: greatestwonderso00sing (find matches)
Title: Greatest wonders of the world
Year: 1906 (1900s)
Authors: Singleton, Esther, d. 1930
Subjects: Curiosities and wonders Landscapes
Publisher: New York, The Christian Herald
Contributing Library: The Library of Congress
Digitizing Sponsor: The Library of Congress

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curative properties of an extraordinary character, which are not possessed in the same degree by any other known waters. Before Mr. Froude's Oceana and the subsequent destruction of the famous pink terraces, little attention had been called to one of the most romantic and amazing spectacles in the world. The old terraces are indeed gone. The idyllic villages, the blossoming slopes are a waste of volcanic ashes and scoriae through which the dauntless vegetation is only now beginning to struggle. The blue waters are displaced and muddy, but the disaster of one shock could not rob the land of its extraordinary mystery and beauty. For a distance of three hundred miles, south of Lake Taupo and running north, a volcanic crust, sometimes thin enough to be trodden through, separates the foot from a seething mass of sulphur, gas, and boiling water, which around Rotorua and Waikari finds strange and ample vents, in hot streams, clouds of vapour, warm lakes, geysers, occasionally devel-
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LAKE ROTORUA 233 oping into appalling volcanic outbursts, which certainly invest this region with a weird terror, but also with an inconceivable charm, as white vapour breaks amidst flowering bushes, in the midst of true valleys of paradise; the streams ripple hot and crystalline over parti-coloured rocks or through emerald-hued mossy dells; the warm lakes sleep embedded in soft, weedy banks, reflecting huge boulders, half clothed in tropical foliage; coral-like deposits here and there of various tints reproduce the famous terraces in miniature ; and geysers, in odd moments, spout huge volumes of boiling water with an unearthly roar eighty feet into the air. At Waikari, near Lake Taupo, specimens of all these wonders are concentrated in a few square miles—the bubbling white mud pools, like foaming plaster of Paris, the petrifying springs, into which a boy fell sometime ago, and getting a good silicate coat over him was taken out months afterwards as good as ever, so my guide explained.

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