The eruption of Tarawera was preceded by many signs of disturbance. Science in chronicling them seems to turn gossip and collect portents with the gusto of Plutarch or Froissart. The calamity came on the 10th of June, and therefore in early winter. The weather had been stormy but had cleared, so no warning could be extracted from its behaviour. But, six months before, the cauldron on the uppermost platform of Te Tarata had broken out in strange fashion. Again and again the water had shrunk far down, and had even been sucked in to the supplying pipe, leaving the boiling pit, thirty yards across and as many feet deep, quite dry. Then suddenly the water had boiled up and a geyser, a mounting column or dome many feet in thickness, had shot up into the air, struggling aloft to the height of a hundred and fifty feet. From it there went up a pillar of steam four or five times as high, with a sound heard far and wide. Geyser-like as the action of the terrace-pool had been, nothing on this scale had been recorded before. Then from the Bay of Plenty came the news that thousands of dead fish had been cast up on the beaches, poisoned by the fumes of some submarine explosion. Furthermore, the crater-lake in White Island suddenly went dry--another novelty. Next, keen-eyed observers saw steam issuing from the top of Ruapehu. They could scarcely believe their eyes, for Ruapehu had been quiescent as far back as man’s memory went. But there was no doubt of it. Two athletic surveyors clambered up through the snows, and there, as they looked down four hundred feet on the crater-lake from the precipices that ringed it in, they saw the surface of the water lifted and shaken, and steam rising into the icy air. Later on, just before the catastrophe, the Maori by Roto-mahana lost their chief by sickness. As he lay dying some of his tribe saw a strange canoe, paddled by phantom warriors, glide across the lake and disappear. The number of men in the canoe was thirteen, and as they flitted by their shape changed and they became spirits with dogs’ heads. The tribe, struck with terror, gave up hope for their chief. He died, and his body lay not yet buried when the fatal night came. Lastly, on the day before the eruption, without apparent cause, waves rose and swept across the calm surface of Lake Tarawera, to the alarm of the last party of tourists who visited the Terrace. Dr. Ralph, one of these, noted also that soft mud had apparently just been ejected from the boiler of the Pink Terrace, and lay strewn about twenty-five yards away. He and his friends hastened away, depressed and uneasy.