But on this side the silica was flushed to a delicate rose, and from every step pink wreaths were hung, and garlands of tinted stone, and on every platform flashed the opalescent stalactites, festooning the ledges, midway down, or dropping from azure pool to azure pool until they reached the golden _solfatara_[70] and the rainbowed mud. One hour after midnight on the 10th of June, men who dwelt or sojourned in this beautiful, dangerous region were awakened by the trembling of the earth and, knowing what that portended, rushed from their houses into the open to see the Mount of Tarawera rent asunder from top to bottom, while from the gaping wound shot up a column of roaring flame, whose capital of smoke and cloud reared itself four and twenty thousand feet above the blazing crater--a beacon of misfortune four miles high. Red lightning played in fork and spiral about the flaming crags or sheeted the gloomy base, and many miles away from the convulsed mountain streams of fire poured upon the stricken earth. Fire-balls fell, a blazing hail, consuming whatsoever they touched, and burying beneath their increasing weight the remains of lonely hut and crowded native village. When the pallid light of the winter dawn struggled through the dense veil of falling debris, Tarawera's mount was seen to be shivered as though smitten by the hammer of Thor; Tarawera's lake had risen forty feet, the trees beside its margin buried to their tops in volcanic mud; Tarawera's river and Rotomahana's lovely terraces were gone for ever, submerged beneath an enormous mass of ashes, mud, and stone. For eighteen hours dust and mud fell continuously, burying fifty feet deep the entire _hapu_ of the Matatu Maori, all save nine, and raining desolation as far as Tauranga on the Bay. Pasture land, grass and fern were burnt bare, and the same volcanic hail which slew the birds in their flight blotted out the food-supply and starved the very rats in the undergrowth. One hundred and one persons perished in this eruption, which was not only the fiercest and most destructive which New Zealand had known since the coming of the Maori, but was one of the most violent recorded in the story of the world.