First Glimpses of Lakeland.

It is through a break in the bush, soon after leaving Mamaku, leading out into vista of ferny hills and gullies, that the train passenger sees, on his right hand, but far below, a blue lake glistening in the westering sun. This lake fills the middle of a shallow basin, which is, from rim to rim, fifteen to twenty miles across. The rims of the basin are soft blue fringes of varied outline, wooded in most places to the sky-line. The land on nearly every side slopes down gracefully and gradually to the level shores. Far below there are well-grassed farms where once there was nothing but manuka scrub and fern and tutu bushes. There are plantation of exotic trees, and gardens, alternating with grey stretches of manuka. A massive mountain partly blocks the view, slanting in long and shapely lines of rest to the manuka levels. This is Ngongotaha. “The Mountain of the Fairies.” in Maori legend. The soft blue lake is Rotorua—“Double Lake,” as it was called by the earliest Maori explorer who first caught sight of it from a viewpoint which showed it apparently divided into two. In the middle of the lake sits a foliaged island, Mokoia, of romantic memory. It rounds off and completes this peaceful water-sheet with a delicious harmony. Sometimes on a day of calm and soft thin gauzy haze it seems uplifted in airy space against the round plates of shimmering water, the blue island of a dream. Again, its wooded slopes and out-jutting rock-faces are all glowing in the gold of a gorgeous sunset, or it rests there in dark purples deepened by evening distances, and the meditative shadows, as you may often see it from the incoming train.

But just now everyone is looking for geysers and steam clouds, and though huge puia are not page 29 seen spouting on lake shores, there are little fleecy jets of vapour far away, rising from the waterside thickets, and on the other side of the lake a white curl of steam rests on the hillside, the sign of Tikitere's great fumaroles and ngawha. Everything is spread out like a map below, for we are more than seventeen hundred feet above sea-level, and eight hundred above Rotorua lake. At Tarukenga station, there is a full, and unobstructed picture of the Rotorua basin, an eye-feast of colour and form, lake, mountain and forest blended like a poem, “a thing finely poised between grandeur and gentleness.”

Beyond the white pumice cliffs on Rotorua's eastern shore, that glisten like chalk in the sun, there is a glint of another lake, Rotoiti of the many bays, and the indigo ranges of Whakapoungakau and the bold dark head of Matawhaura mountain build up the far eastern skyline. Little beaches glimmer white; the lake is streaked and shot with patches and veins like the inside of the iridescent pawa shell, and a white sail or two and flitting motor-launches give life to the waters of calm. Here and there below us the slopes and levels are softly painted and panelled with the grassy fields of farms; as a great lover of the out-of-doors wrote of Belvoir Vale, the scene is “glorious and beautiful with the unconscious and labour paints upon the canvas of Nature.” But the paint-brush of civilisation has touched only a portion of this lakeland hollow. Grey and sage-green and blue are the dominant colours; manuka and fern and range-clinging forest are still components of the colour scheme in this great saucer of the Arawa country. Soon all this country will be covered with grove-sheltered homesteads and orchards and gardens, and then the boiling holes and sulphur pools and the sinter terraces and alum cliffs will seem all the more wonderful by contrast.