where all the electric light and power used at Rotorua is generated, and came back via the channel and Rotorua.
The sun was declining when we reached a landing in Rotorua, where we left the boat in order to visit Hamurana Spring. The water from this spring is so buoyant that a man cannot go down into it unless he has heavy weights attached to his feet, and it is so transparently clear that one can see to the very bottom of the well, where there are some bits of blue china or pottery that look like shining turquoise. This spring is a perfect mine of wealth to the small Maori boys, for visitors, anxious to test the truth of the assertion about the buoyancy of the water, throw coins in, especially coppers of course, and there they lie a few feet from the surface in nooks and ledges all the way round, until some enterprising youngster weights himself and goes down to gather in the harvest.
We tried the Priest bath this morning, just for fun, for neither of us have ever had rheumatism, which it is supposed to cure. But we did not like it, and will not repeat the experience. The water felt gritty to the touch, and the sulphur underfoot was horribly slimy. Of course it is all right for rheumatic people, as they know that it is doing them good, but I felt that I had wasted a Rachel by spending the time in the Priest!
Tuesday, 6th.—We have had a glorious day in the forest,—such a treat after the mud pools and sulphur smells of the last few days. We started quite early this morning in a motor-car, en route for the hot springs at Okoroire, the road running right through the forest we traversed the other day in the train. A mile or two out of Rotorua we stopped to look at the trout in a hill-side spring; there were simply millions of them, big and small, and so tame that they came to the very edge of the pool to look at us! And then we passed the monument erected to the unfortunate Englishman, Bainbridge, who was killed in the Tarawera eruption, the only white person who perished that night, a tourist, and quite young, poor fellow.
The forest was lovelier than ever at close quarters, and I should have liked to spend the day there, but when, on leaving it, we plunged headlong down a pass winding through a maze of hills all clothed in a myriad shades of green, the perfect beauty of the scene made me forget every other while I looked upon it.
Flaming out from among the dark pines were masses of rata here and there; clematis draped the dark foliage of the honey-suckle trees as if in rivalry of its own sweet-scented blossoms, and convolvulus crept caressingly over the mossy trunks of the red pines. And everywhere there was manuka, the heathery, fragrant, white-flowered shrub that makes beautiful the desert places and supplies so many needs that I wonder New Zealand does not make it her symbolic flower. Far away behind the numberless hills before and below us lay Okoroire, and as we stopped now and then to examine ferns or flowers we did not arrive until just in time for luncheon, which we had at the hotel.
