“Not I! There’s no water in this ---- country hot enough to boil me. Help me out!” It appeared that the torrents of rain which had been falling had flooded a cold stream hard by, and this, overflowing into the pool, had made it pleasantly tepid. [Illustration: NGONGOTAHA MOUNTAIN] Needless to say, there is one fatal event, the story of which overshadows all other stories told of the thermal zone. It is the one convulsion of Nature there, since the settlement of New Zealand, that has been great enough to become tragically famous throughout the world, apart from its interest to science. The eruption of Mount Tarawera was a magnificent and terrible spectacle. Accompanied as it was by the blowing-up of Lake Roto-mahana, it destroyed utterly the beautiful and extraordinary Pink and White Terraces. There can be no doubt that most of those who saw them thought the lost Pink and White Terraces the finest sight in the thermal region. They had not the grandeur of the volcanoes and the lakes, or the glorious energy of the geysers; but they were an astonishing combination of beauty of form and colour, of what looked like rocky massiveness with the life and heat of water in motion. Then there was nothing else of their kind on the earth at all equal to them in scale and completeness. So they could fairly be called unique, and the gazer felt on beholding them that in a sense this was the vision of a lifetime. Could those who saw them have known that the spectacle was to be so transient, this feeling must have been much keener. For how many ages they existed in the ferny wilderness, seen only by a few savages, geologists may guess at. Only for about twelve years were they the resort of any large number of civilised men. It is strange how little their fame had gone abroad before Hochstetter described them after seeing them in 1859. Bidwill, who was twice at Roto-rua in 1839, never mentions them. The naturalist Dieffenbach, who saw them in 1842, dismisses them in a paragraph, laudatory but short. George French Angas, the artist, who was the guest of Te Heu Heu in 1845, and managed, against express orders, to sketch Tongariro, does not seem to have heard of them. Yet he of all men might have been expected to get wind of such a marvel. For a marvel they were, and short as was the space during which they were known to the world, their fame must last until the Fish of Maui is engulfed in the ocean. There, amid the green manuka and rusty-green bracken, on two hill-sides sloping down to a lake of moderate size--Roto-mahana or Warm Lake,--strong boiling springs gushed out. They rose from two broad platforms, each about a hundred yards square, the flooring of craters with reddish-brown sides streaked and patched with sulphur. Their hot water, after seething and swirling in two deep pools, descended to the lake over a series of ledges, basins, or hollowed terraces, which curved out as boldly as the swelling canvas of a ship, so that