V.

Forthwith their gladsome way they take
To all the marvels of the Lake.
To Wata-poho's endless wail
They list—the groans its tortures wrest
From its hard agonising breast,
So hollow, inward-deep and fierce,
As upward shoot its showers intense,
Cramming the narrow shaft they pierce
Through shuddering rocks blanched ashy-pale;
Hot water, steam and sulphur-smoke
Commingling in one column dense
Of white terrific turbulence!
But other gentler feelings woke
Its sister fountain welling ni'gh,
Whose bursts of grief for moments brief
Long-intervailed, in streams out-broke,
And then would sink away and die
page 277 With such soft moan relapsing slow—
Such long-drawn breath of utter woe—
It well became its mournful name,
'Kó-ingo—Love's desponding Sigh.'
They visit then that narrow glen,
Where at the foot of hills forlorn,
Silicious slabs of spar flood borne,
Like cakes of ice when Spring is young,
Burst up by freshets wild, are flung:
And slow they pick their cautious way
By liquid beds of creamy clay,
Where large white nipples rise and sink,
And lazy bubbles break and fume,
Up to a small square tarn pea-green—
As green and bright as malachite,
Beneath a crimson cliff in part
White-mottled, and along the brink
Of that clear water's grass-hued sheen—
Where azure dragon-flies will dart
A moment—feathered rich and dark
With mánuka, like fragrant broom.
And near the valley's mouth they mark,
Where thickets dense scarce leave a track,
A boiling mud-pool sputtering black
And baleful;—mark, above its gloom
What weird wild shapes the rocks assume!
Here, worn by water's sapping might,
Time-crennelled turrets half o'erthrown;
There, idols blurred by ages' flight
To shapes of unconjectured stone;
Now on the hill's low brow upright,
Like men who walk in dreams by night,
Dumbfounded, tottering—lost and lone;
page 278 Now, muffled forms their faces shrouding
Opprest with some unheard-of doom;
Or woe-struck up the hillside crowding—
Funereal mourners round a tomb:—
Grotesque and ominous and grim,
As Dore's wonder-teeming whim
E'er forged and fixed in stony trance
Of subtle-shaped significance.

And next across the Lake they steer
To see that fair cascaded stair
That yester-eye they passed so near—
'The Fountain of the Clouded Sky,'
Tu-kápua-rangi—fitly styled,
It flings its steam so wide and high.
'Tis rosy rime they climb this time;
For floors and fringes, terrace piled
O'er terrace, glow with faint carmine
As fashioned of camelian fine;
As if, continuous, full, from heaven
Some wide white avalanche downward driven
With sanguine hues it still retained.
But at the topmost terrace—lo,
A vision like a lovely dream!—
A basin large, its further marge
And all its surface hid in steam
That thinly driving o'er it flies,
Spreads, level with the level plain
Of smoothest milk-white marble grain:
And all around its nearer brink
A border broad of delicate pink
That melts to lemon-yellow, dyes
page 279 That whiteness, and with even hues
Fair as a rainbow laid on snow,
Its wavy outline still pursues.
But through the driving vapour, see,
Translucent depths of azure, bright
And soft as heaven's divinest blue
A gulf profound of liquid light!
And from those depths, uprising through
That azure light—yet all beneath
The steaming surface—still as death,
In snowy mute solemnity,
A mighty forward-bending peak
Of" marble bows; shaped like a paw,
Say, some enormous polar bear's—
Thick-set with many a flattened claw,
All one way level-pointing—scale
O'er scale like th' Indian pangolin's mail—
All snowiest alabaster!—Weak,
Too weak, were any words to speak
The hushed mysterious charm it wears,
That ghostly-lovely miracle,
Whose sides of snow far down below
In boiling light that round them lies,
Fade where the clear cerulean glow
Of that unfathomed fervent well,
In tenderest turquoise dimness dies!
O well may Ranolf for a while
Enthusiast-like, sit rapt before
That heaven-blue gulf and rock snow-white,
Unconscious even of Amo's smile,
Unconscious of her joyous eyes,
And loving arms he scarce could feel
That softly would around him steal
page 280 As silent by his side she lay
On that pure speckless snowy floor
With pink and saffron purfle gay.

Thus all the varied fountains found
Among the ferny hills that bound
Mahana, and a mile around—
Of every flow and hue and sound
They visit;—tall columnar mound
And diamond-cone, and haycock heap
Of boiling snow, and springs that leap
And languish, spurting fitful spray,
And cloud-crowned stems of steam that spout
At seasons, or shoot up alway;
Hid white about this verdurous waste
Like statues in proud gardens placed:
And one large font whose hollow bed
With branching emerald coral spread,
Through brilliant boiling crystal shows,
Fine as the daintiest moss that grows!—
And sights as dread they meet throughout,
As wild Imagination's worst
Of black hell-broths and witches' bowls
Infernal—Dante-pits accurst,
Here realised in cankerous holes
And sloughs of mud as red as blood,
Pitch-black, or viscid yellow-drab,
Or pap of clay light-bluish gray.
Or sulphurous gruel thick and slab:
Each sputtering, hot, commixture dire,
Earth mineral-stuffed, and flood and fire.
Together pashed and pent-up make.
And fuse in sluggish fever nought can slake.
page 281 So passed the day; and swiftly sped
Mid scenes where marvels ever varying rise;
The wanderers' eyes with wonder ever fed—
Bright with continual flashes of surprise.