Rotomahana, the wonderful lake in the heart of our Thermal Regions, has attracted more than usual attention recently, because of a suggestion that its level should be lowered in order to give the geyser action along its shores more play, and particularly to allow investigation to be made for traces of the lost White Terraces and Pink Terraces, the one-time glories of the lake. In this article the old-time Rotomahana and its environment are described, and some account of the present lake is given.

“Before the Eruption” is a period hazed with a kind of romance in our Rotorua Geyserland. Everything was more or less adventurous and devoid of the luxuries which we take so easily to-day. Travel was slow; time jogged along like the old coachie's horses; you didn't get everything in the hotels by merely pressing a button or turning on a switch. There was no railway to Rotorua; you either went from Auckland to Tauranga by steamer and thence drove through the Oropi Bush route to Ohinemutu, or else took the long coach journey from the Cambridge railhead. There were no fine bath-houses wherein you laved your delicate limbs on sumptuous porcelain sunk in the floor like some old Roman palace bath. You just dipped in the pool amongst the manuka scrub or with your native friends, male and female, in the social warm bay at Ruapeka or a score of other places. And the centre of the sight-seeing traffic was not the Rotorua township so much as Te Wairoa, now so celebrated as the Buried Village, the point of embarkation for the great showplace of the “Hot Springs,” as the thermal district was then generally called, the Terraces of Rotomahana.

Yonder looms the grim old mountain that changed all that, that ruined the old easygoing life of the Lakes as it ruined the most lovely things in wild Nature in this territory. Tarawera may be harmless to-day, but it towers there in sulky desolation, unrepentant of its ferocious past, menacingly regarding those who venture up its shattered sides as much as to say: “If you don't look out and behave with respect and circumspection I'll do it all over again.”

Forty-five years have passed since the eruption of Tarawera and the destruction of Rotomahana. Some of the physical changes which were brought about by the outburst would seem to have been the work of centuries, so greatly have they altered the face of the land in the central part of the Thermal country. Most of all has this transformation affected Rotomahana. The little shallow reedy lake of the pre-eruption era is now a deep gulf of water many times its former size, with a surface nearly 150 feet above its before-the-eruption level. The tourist's power-launch cruises through clouds of steam, floats on water that thuds against the lake thumping with threatening fist, as if to announce that he is still all-powerful if he but wished to assert his might.