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Photo by E.B.G.
Chapter V.
WONDERS BY THE WAY.
“Come, let us laugh at poor deluded Death
And his plumed pageantry, that hides with tears
The mortal ’neath the consecrated sod!
He is the slave no more of pulse or breath,
Or Time that gives itself in rusting years,
But one who shares Eternity with God.”
We left Rotorua early on Saturday morning to drive to the buried village of Wairoa,—buried under the rain of mud and stones that fell during the eruption of Tarawera in 1886. All the way there are evidences of that terrible night,—a wilderness of pumice and cinders where there once was verdure, a great cleft in the earth like a jagged wound about forty feet deep, for miles along the side of the road, and ugly scars on the hillside where the land had slipped, leaving it bare.
But suddenly we turned a corner into shady woodland as serenely lovely as if earthquakes and eruptions were unknown. Great trees spread their branches over the road, tree-fern and its myriad satellites, from dainty maidenhair and
