380 MYSTIC ISLES 



that many times they had crashed down into the abyss. 

 We saw a score of white cascades. It seemed: 



A land of streams. Some like a downward smoke, 

 Slow-dropping veils of thinnest lawn, did go ; 

 And some through wavering lights and shadows broke, 

 Rolling a slumbrous sheet of foam below. 



We arrived at a plateau after seven hours of hard 

 toil, almost all the time pursuing a rocky path: it was 

 the crown of the mountain and the borders of the lake. 

 Though we had surmounted only thirteen hundred feet 

 of verticality, we had come by such steeps that we could 

 not wait an instant before throwing off our light gar- 

 ments and plunging into the water. The lake occupied 

 an extinct crater, surrounded by four mountains un- 

 equally raised up — Tetufera, Urufaa, Purahu, and 

 Terouotupo. It is half a mile long and a third wide, of 

 curious shape, the banks making it appear in the dusk 

 like a babe in swaddling-clothes with its arms outside the 

 band. A great natural reservoir, fed by many subter- 

 ranean springs, it gives birth to many others at the feet 

 of the mountains, in Mataiea and Papeari. 



After a repast, it being already late, we built a house 

 to sleep in away from the dews of the heights, and Tiura 

 recalled that the first Pomare took his name from a time 

 when he had spent the night here and coughed from the 

 exposure. His followers had spoken of the po mare, 

 meaning literally, night cough, and the euphony pleased 

 the king so that he adopted the name and bequeathed it 

 to four successors. All these Polynesians took their 

 names at birth or later from incidents in their own or 

 others' lives, as my own chief's — "Deal Coffin," from a 



