on the sea-coast to the east were eating their morning meals--if they cared to eat at all--by candle-light. To say that it was a darkness that could be felt would be to belittle its horrors absurdly--at any rate near Tarawera. For miles out from the mountain it was a darkness that smote and killed you--made up as it was of mud and fire, burning stones, and suffocating dust. Whence came the mud? Partly, no doubt, it was formed by steam acting on the volcanic dust-cloud; but, in part, it was the scattered contents of Roto-mahana--a whole lake hurled skyward, water and ooze together. With Roto-mahana went its shores, the Terraces, several neighbouring smaller lakes and many springs. Yet so tremendous was the outburst that even this wreck was not physically the chief feature of the destruction. That was the great rift, an irregular cleft, fourteen or fifteen miles long, opened across the Tarawera and its companion heights. This earth-crack, or succession of cracks, varied in depth from three hundred to nine hundred feet. To any one looking down into it from one of the hill-tops commanding it, it seemed half as deep again. It, and the surrounding black scoria cast up from its depths, soon became cold and dead; but, continuing as it did to bear the marks of the infernal fires that had filled it, the great fissure remained in after years the plainest evidence of that dark night’s work. When I had a sight of it in 1891, it was the centre of a landscape still clothed with desolation. The effect was dreary and unnatural. The deep wound looked an injury to the earth as malign as it was gigantic. It was precisely such a scene as would have suggested to a zealot of the Middle Ages a vision of the pit of damnation. [Illustration: LAKE AND MOUNT TARAWERA]