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The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Volume 6, Issue 6 (December 1, 1931)

Froude's Pink Terraces Bath

Froude's Pink Terraces Bath.

More poetic, if less scientific, is that eloquent passage in J. A. Froude's “Oceana,” describing the pleasures of the warm baths on the Pink Terraces and the glory of the crater pool. His Maori guide took him to the Pink after seeing the White Terraces. “The youth,” he wrote, “led us up the shining stairs. The crystals were even more beautiful than those we had seen, falling like clusters of rosy icicles or hanging in festoons like creepers trailing from a rail. At the foot of each cascade the water lay in pools of ultramarine; their exquisite colour was due in part, I suppose, to the light of the sky refracted upward from the bottom. The temperature was 94 or 95 degrees. The water was deep enough to swim in comfortably, though not over our heads.

“We lay on our backs and floated for ten minutes in exquisite enjoyment, and the alkali, or the flint, or the perfect purity of the element, seemed to saturate our systems. I, for one, when I was dressed again, could have fancied myself back in the old days, when I did not know that I had a body and could run up hill as lightly as down.”

Froude gave us this picture of the crater pool at the top of the Pink Terrace: “The hue of the water was something I had never seen, and shall never again see this side of eternity. Not the violet, not the harebell, nearest in its tint to heaven of all Nature's flowers, not turquoise, not sapphire, not the unfathomable aether itself could convey to one who had not looked on it a sense of the supernatural loveliness. Comparison could only soil such inimitable purity. The only colour I ever saw in sky or on earth in its least resembling the aspect of this extraordinary pool was the flame of burning sulphur. Here was a bath, if mortal flesh could have borne to dive into it!”