viting it looks. And yet it would boil the flesh from your bones did you but trust yourself to its siren seductiveness. At one pit mouth close by, the mephitic breath from below has bleached the overhanging scrub to a ghastly yellowish white. It is shudderingly suggestive of grave-clothes. The marvels are legion. The sensations they excite I shall not attempt to analyze. It is a memory to linger with one for a lifetime.
Commerce here has her votaries, however. One Maori offers us a carved stick for sale. Mistaking us for a Rothschild, he demands a pound for the product of his industry, but without a blush eventually transfers the stick at a reduction of only fifty per cent.; and we are presently thrown into paroxysms of gratification by the information which is volunteered by an acid old cynic, that "if we had on'y bluffed the beggar, we mout a 'ad it for five bob."
Entering our vehicles again, we sweep once more through the plain in the direction of the lake, and crossing the river begin to climb the skirting hills, by a long, devious, dusty track. Presently we pass a lonely tombstone, sacred to the memory of a drunken Maori, who broke his neck by falling from his horse while returning from a festive party, about a year ago.
Gazing through a narrow gorge on the right, we see the long square table-top of steep Horo Horo; the intervening champaign being a succession of those terraces and ravines and cones, so characteristic of "all the region round about."
