AND ASPECT OF THE COUNTRY. 
5 
romantic in their appearance, nor less curious in 
their structure. Their openings are overgrown 
with brush-wood, so luxuriant as to reach from 
side to side, and to cover the mouths of the caves; 
which renders the approach to them dangerous. 
We burnt the brush- wood ; and rolled large stones 
into one of the caves ; which bounded from shelf 
to shelf, till the echo was lost in the distance, or 
distinguished in the last sound by the splash of a 
spring of water, into which they had fallen at the 
bottom, and which discharges itself into the lake at 
the base of the hill. We saw several dead bodies, 
deposited by the natives in some of these caves, as 
a place of security for burial : in others, we per- 
ceived the remains of the bodies of murdered 
victims, carelessly rolled down here, to save the 
trouble of further interment. The whole of these 
caverns are of precisely the same description, and 
terminate in the same opening to the lake. The 
diameter of the mouth of one which we measured— 
and our observation told us that they were nearly 
all of the same dimensions— was nearly thirty- 
three feet; and seemed very gradually to narrow, 
as far as the eye could carry you down its dreary 
and dark abyss. There are several hills of the 
same character as Putahi : one, named Poherua, 
is completely hollow: it has the remarkable ap- 
pearance of a hill, whose apex has been removed 
by some violent volcanic eruption. The shell 
is covered with high fern, and a species of the 
tree named Kahikatoa ( Leptospermum scoparium J, 
