Waikato's Bold Defile.

The landscapes here have a wildness, a rocky grandeur, that will some day make the Orakei-Korako gorge road a famous travel track. The craggy hills bear huge pikaus of rhyolite on their shoulders, and their sides are scarred and shattered by the volcanic forces of past ages. One could well quote from “The Lady of the Lake” an exact description of part of this road, as rugged as anything in Scott's country:

“Twined the path in shadow hid,
Round many a rocky pyramid,
Shooting abruptly from the dell
Its thunder-splinter'd pinnacle;
Round many an insulated mass,
The native bulwarks of the pass.”

Far more wonderful, though, this Waikato river-pass scene than all the scenes of the Scottish High-lands, for, see, up the valley yonder there rise soft curling clouds, snowy white against the dark green vegetation and the darker rocks; the steam clouds from the geysers and fumaroles that pit both sides of the swift-rolling Waikato.

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Up there the whole valley is alive, simmering, bubbling, thumping with thermal action. The boiling springs extend for over an area about a mile in length; much of this is dangerous to explore. Many of the hissing fissures and plopping mud-pools are not accessible; which is just as well; there are quite enough of them to be seen in and around the old kainga where the delicious bathing waters issue from the papa-kohatu, amongst the flowering aromatic manuka.

The strong river rolling through the gorge, to break in furious rapids lower down; the silica-terrace-whitened banks, and the smoke-like jets and clouds of steam from the boiling springs, compose perhaps the strangest picture to be seen in the Thermal Regions of ours. It is still in its wild state everywhere here; no bridge spans the great river, no hotel and no smartly decorative bath-houses jar on our sense of the artistic—Nature's tameless artistry—however much they would promote our comfort. Orakei-Korako still awaits the touch of civilised development.