Gazing anywhere, up and down the valley, some of the most beautiful and curious sights presented themselves. The warm stream which gathered its waters from the overflowing geysers and springs wound its course amidst the trees, sparkling and glittering beneath the sun. In some places its sides were entirely fringed with silicious deposits, some white and beautiful like overhanging folds of lace, some dipping down into the water in the form of enormous stalactites, while others, assuming a rounded buttress-like formation, were green with ferns and dank mosses of varied hue. At another moment a rocky point came into view, and above the clustering ferns, brilliant in the soft rays of light, the tall _manuka_ trees, which here attained to wonderful proportions, cast their gnarled branches in a dense canopy overhead, and from the very water's edge, where the warm springs bubbled and hissed, to the very summit of the valley on either side the heated soil gave life to countless wonders of the vegetable world. Threading our way through the scrub over the hot, spongy soil, we came to Tahuatahi, a powerful intermittent geyser, with steep, rugged sides, flanked by enormous buttresses of white silica rock. The cauldron was formed by a deep hole, about twenty feet in circumference, from which a column of boiling water shot up now and again from a dense cloud of steam as it overflowed into the stream below. At a short distance from this point we crossed the creek, the sides of which were here covered with a thick growth of moss, which luxuriated in a kind of tropical heat, caused by the jets of steam which coiled out from small fissures in the soil on which it grew. When I inserted the thermometer about a foot beneath the soil at this spot, and right under the very roots of the moss, it rose rapidly to 210° Fahr. Further along was Terekirike, a large geyser, situated on the very margin of the stream. Its cauldron was of irregular formation, but rugged and beautiful in appearance, the rounded, boulder-like masses of which it was built up being of a delicate cream-colour, while the silicious crystals, assuming the most fantastic forms, tinged here and there with a pinkish hue, imparted to the whole a singularly beautiful and delicate appearance. Next to this was the "Whistling Geyser," which threw up a column of boiling water at the summit of a terrace of silicious rock, while next to this again was a boiling cauldron where the heated water burst forth with a loud bubbling sound. All these three geysers formed a terrace-like formation of silicious rock, which was tinted in colours of white, pink, and yellow, while the gnarled roots of the trees, and branches which had fallen to the ground, within the action of the water had been completely covered and cemented, as it were, to the rock by the silicious deposits. Here the thermal action appeared to be very active, and as soon as one geyser subsided, another would burst forth, as it were, with redoubled vigour.