When walking around the _whares_, and noticing the various phases of Maori hot-spring life, I saw half a dozen members of the porcine tribe come quietly along with an easy, self-satisfied air, as if they had just gone through their morning ablutions in the warm, bubbling fountains, and were going to root round for steamed potatoes, boiled cabbage, and other delicacies. Suddenly a half-naked Maori slunk out of his hut, with a long knife between his teeth. Quick as thought, and with the skill of a champion assassin, he seized the foremost pig by the hind leg. A prod from the knife, and the crimson blood of the murdered animal mingled with a rill of boiling water, which was running past in a hurry, as it were, to cool itself in the lake. A twist of the wrist, and the pig was jerked into a steaming pool, where the heated waters twirled and hissed as if in a red-hot cauldron. Out again in an instant, and then he set to work to scrape off the bristles, which came away in flakes, as if they had simply been stuck on by nature by the aid of a little glue, and the skin of the porker gleamed white as snow beneath the sun. In two minutes more he was disemboweled, and then he was placed over a steam-hole, with a couple of sacks over him, to be cooked for the evening meal. From the time that pig gaily walked the earth until the end of that terrible process, about fifteen minutes expired. The area in the immediate vicinity of Lake Rotorua where the action of the thermal springs is most active may be said to extend from Whakarewarewa on the one side to Te Koutu on the other. The distance between the two points is about three and a half miles, the thermal action extending inland for about a mile from the border of the lake to Ariki Kapakapa, celebrated for its big holes of black, boiling mud. A short distance from the eastern shore of the lake is Tikitere, a narrow valley in the centre of which is a boiling-water basin, about seventy feet in diameter, and which is surrounded in every direction by hot mud-pools and boiling springs. Close to Tikitere is Lake Rotoiti,[17] whose deep bays and jutting headlands impart to it a very beautiful appearance. Hot springs occur on its southern shore, while still further to the east of it, again, are the warm lakes known as Rotoma and Rotoehu, the waters of the two latter being rendered of a greyish, opaque colour by the action of the subaqueous springs.