Seen from the shores of the bay it looks peaceful enough. Its only peculiarity seems to be a white cloud rising high or streaming on the wind to leeward from the tip of its cone. At a distance the cloud appears not unlike other white clouds; but in the brightest weather it never vanishes away. I once spent three sunny spring days in riding round the great arc of the Bay of Plenty, often cantering for miles together along the sandy beach. There, out to sea, lay White Island always in view and always flying its white vapour-flag. In reality the quiet-looking islet seethes with fiery life. Seen at close quarters it is found to be a shell, which from one side looks comically like the well-worn stump of a hollow tooth. It is a barren crater near a thousand feet high, enclosing what was a lake and is now shrunk to a warm green pool, ringed with bright yellow sulphur. Hot springs boil and roar on the crater-lake’s surface, ever sending up columns of hissing and roaring steam many hundred feet into the air. At times, as in 1886, the steam has shot to the almost incredible height of fifteen thousand feet, a white pillar visible a hundred miles away. You may thrust a stick through the floor of the crater into the soft hot paste beneath. The walls of the abyss glow with heat, steam-jets hiss from their fissures, and on the outside is a thick crust of sulphur. The reek of the pit’s fumes easily outdoes that of the blackest and most vicious of London fogs. “It is not that soft smell of Roto-rua,” wrote Mr. Buddle, who smelt the place in 1906, “but an odour of sulphurous acid which sticks in one’s throat.” Yet commerce once tried to lay hands on White Island, and men were found willing to try and work amid its noisome activities. Commerce, however, failed to make Tartarus pay. Not far away from White Island lies Mayor Island, which once upon a time must have been an even stranger spot. It also is a high crater. On the rim of its yawning pit are to be seen the ruins of a Maori stockade, which, perched in mid-air and approachable only over the sea, must have been a hard nut for storming parties to crack in the bygone days of tribal wars. All is quiet now; the volcano has died out and the wars have become old tales. [1] After writing this page I found that Mr. Percy Smith, formerly Surveyor-General, gives another version of the legend. He tells how the hero Ngatoro, landing on the shore of the Bay of Plenty, went inland, and, with a companion named Ngauruhoe, climbed Tongariro. Near the summit, Ngauruhoe died of cold, and Ngatoro, himself half-frozen, shouted to his sisters far away in the legendary island of Hawaiki to bring fire. His cry reached them far across the ocean, and they started to his rescue. Whenever they halted--as at White Island--and lit their camp fire, geysers spouted up from the ground. But when at length they reached Tongariro, it was only to find that Ngatoro, tired of waiting for them, had gone back to the coast.