And yet this waste was once the mother-earth of a mighty forest. Majestic kauris rose, here, not in isolated grandeur, but in groves and assemblies of unparalleled splendour, and so shallow their grave that almost any handful of soil, sifted through the fingers, yields leaves and cones—some in perfect form—of the buried trees. Adjacent to the valley of the springs are several small lakes of mineral water, each perhaps a couple of acres in extent. One of these, known as the Soda Lake—an apparently shallow sheet of dirty-yellow water heavily charged with mineral alkali—must have been a close-pillared temple of Tane, for its entire surface is broken by the gnarled roots, the shattered trunks and the scattered limbs of the dead giants of the forest. What a day must have been that when fickle nature, with fiery sword and thunderous cannonade, laid low at one swoop the glorious results of her centuries of quiet building! What catac lysmal force must the upheaval have assumed to so shatter these huge boles, some of which are splintered into matchwood, and who knows what animate—perhaps human—life went down in this orgy of destruction to share the honoured dust with the monarchs of the forest.