"Be sure to follow me or Erena most carefully, and do not step away from the path, or into any water that you have not tried. One traveller did so, and, as it was at boiling heat, died next day, poor fellow! So now, let us begin. Do you see this yellow waterbasin? This is the champagne pool. For the champagne, watch this effect." Here a couple of handfuls of earth were thrown in. Thereupon the strange water commenced to effervesce angrily, the circles spreading until the outermost edges of the pool were reached. "The outlet, you see, is over that slope, and is known as the Primrose Falls. But we must not linger. Beyond that boiling lake, with the steam clouds hanging over it, lies a terrace, gradually sloping, with ripples in the siliceous deposit, finally ending in miniature marble cascades." "All this is wonderful and astonishing, but it is only the beginning of the play. I shall reserve my applause until the last act. I have been in strange places abroad, but never saw so many different sorts of miracles in one collection. What are those cliffs, for instance, so white and glistening?" "The Alum Cliffs, sparkling with incrustations of alum. You notice that they rise almost perpendicularly from the hot-water pools? In contrast, the colour of the surrounding earth varies from pale yellow to Indian red and crimson. Some of the crystals you see around are strongly acid. The pools are all sorts of colours: some like pots of red paint, others green, blue, pink, orange, and cream." "Evidently Nature's laboratories. What she will evolve is as yet unknown to us. Let us hope it will be more or less beneficial." "It is hard to say," replied Warwick, musingly. "There is a legend among the Maoris that, many generations since, this valley, now so desolate, was covered with villages, the soil being very productive; that the inhabitants displeased the local Atua, upon which he ordered a volcano in the neighbourhood to pour forth its fiery flood. An eruption followed, which covered the village many feet deep with the scoria and mud which, in a hardened state, you now see." "Highly probable. I can believe anything of this sulphur-laden Valley of the Shadow. And did the mountain disappear also?" "No! there he stands, three thousand feet high, quite ready, if one may judge from appearances, for another fiery shower. Let us hope he will not do it in our time. In the mean time, look at this Boiling Lake. Is not the water beautifully blue? And what clouds of steam! It is much the same, except in size, as the one above the Pink Terrace." The day wore on as they rambled from one spot to another of the magical region.