The World's Best Boil

Taranaki is famous for two reasons; the first is Mount Egmont and the second is Mount Egmont.

To visit New Zealand's land of milk and money without making a close inspection of Egmont is akin to taking a bath without water. In these days of vacuum cleaners, perhaps the analogy is not complete, but it will serve. I have met only one man who did not admire Egmont, but he was an ice-cream manufacturer in private life, whom the doctor had ordered to Taranaki to forget his business.

The sightseer can run up Egmont (or partly so) but no visitor has ever had the courage to run it down—before he has got safely out of Taranaki.

Mount Egmont is a breath-taking spectacle. So much so in fact that the collector of mountain dues has adopted a method of taking something from the visitor besides his breath. There is a gate near the base of the mountain. It is an innocent looking gate. There is nothing ominous or sinister or foreboding about it. But that is where the catch lies. The moment the visitor touches the gate his action sets in motion some concealed mechanism and out bounds an official from a little house cunningly concealed in the shrubbery, and relieves him of a shilling.

Any reasonable person will admit that it takes a lot of money to support a great big thing like a mountain. It is not the sort of thing a man could take up as a hobby—he couldn't run it on his salary. But it seems a tactical error to collect a shilling from the vistor before he has even set foot on the mountain. There must be people to whom even a mountain is dear at a shilling. A superior plan would be to let the sightseer in without a fee and charge him to get Out. There must be hundreds of visitors who would prefer to pay a shilling rather than spend the rest of their lives on a mountain top. Eg-mont broods over Taranaki like a huge and melancholy blanc-mange. Wherever the visitor looks he sees Egmont. The only way not to see Egmont is to wear blinkers. Egmont has been described as a phenomenon, a monstrous whim of Nature, and a gigantic protuberance, but the best description came from a gentleman from the States who exclaimed: “My! I'll say that Eg-maant's sure the world's best boil.”

The sightseer climbs up to the hostel through bush which looks dark and primeval. It would hardly surprise him if a naked tatooed Maori were to peer out at him with rolling fearful eyes as the motor groans past in second gear. But he is more likely to meet on the road (as did we), a surveyor, a handful of roadmen, a steam-roller and a tar-boiler. Even romance is tar-sealed in these days of progress. But in spite of man, Egmont broods, a grim and hoary monument to the past. What scenes the dark old mountain must have witnessed, what secrets must be locked in her rocky breast. She is a siren; she fascinates, she beckons, and she is capable of destroying.