DESCRIPTIVE SKETCH OF NEll' /.]<:. I LAND. 



1099 



severely, only some ten or a dozen Maoris losing their lives. The two European 

 hotels were wrecked, but all their terror-stricken inmates, save a young English tourist 

 named Edwin Hainbridge, were fortunate enough to make good their escape. On the 

 morning after the eruption the sun rose upon a scene of mournful desolation. The 

 eighteen miles of country between Rotorua and Rotomahana (the prefix Roto signifying 

 "lake") were covered with a bluish-gray mantle of thick adhesive volcanic mud, of an 

 average depth of four inches, but deepening as one approached nearer and nearer to 

 Tarawera. The sombre surface of this deposit was dotted over with the bodies of rats 

 and mice, while homeless birds wheeled overhead in affrighted bewilderment ; the pretty 



"THE PINK TERRACE. 



little oasis of Tikitapu Bush lay stretched in devastation, the Blue Lake at its foot had 

 been transformed into a sheet of dirty brown water, the Green Lake, " Rotokakahi," had 

 sunk its beauties in repulsive turbidity ; the icharc roofs of Wairoa, peering above the 

 solitude of debris, told their own mute tale of dire calamity ; Moura and Te Ariki, with 

 their scores of dead, were for ever swallowed up from human ken; the Terraces would no 

 longer ravish the eye of the beholder, and the Rotomahana had suddenly become a mis- 

 nomer from a lake it had developed into a seething, steaming and raging chauldron of 

 mud and slime. Tarawera, the silent and impassive, on whose broad head long genera- 

 tions of Maoris had with reverential awe deposited their dead, was enveloped in heavy 

 masses of vapour, and when they gradually attenuated it was seen that an enormous 



