SECLUDED IN A remote corner of colonial New Zealand lay what some 19th-century travellers called the Eighth Wonder of the World: two terraced stairways of silica that cascaded down fern-covered slopes to the waters of a small naturally heated lake.

These delicate constructions of nature, which sparkled under the massive buttresses of a sombre mountain, were known by Maori as Otukapuarangi (Fountain of the Clouded Sky) and Te Tarata (the Tattooed Rock). Pakeha labelled them, less poetically, the Pink and White Terraces.

They were the star attraction in a geothermal wonderland the like of which was unknown elsewhere in the world. The hot springs of Iceland—which gave the world the word geysa, to gush—paled in comparison, and North America’s Yellowstone was yet to make its mark.

To gaze on the terraces, tourists had to get themselves first to Ohinemutu, on the shore of Lake Rotorua—generally by a combination of coastal steamer and coach. Once at the small resort town, where they were immediately enveloped by the distinctive odour of sulphuretted hydrogen, new arrivals plugged into a well-rehearsed tourist programme. Having recovered from their journey, and perhaps having sampled the waters of the Rachel or Priest Bath, they clambered aboard a coach for the 16 km ride through hill country and the beautiful Tikitapu bush to the village of Te Wairoa, Gateway to the Terraces.

At Te Wairoa visitors were ministered to at several Pakeha-run hotels and stores, before being treated to a haka and Maori singing in the impressive wharepuni, or meeting house, named Hinemihi.
Early the following morning the party, with hotel luncheon, towels, bathing costumes and old footwear for walking around the terraces, made their way to the boathouse on Lake Tarawera. In canoes or whaleboats they were conveyed to the small kainga of Te Ariki, stopping en route to purchase baskets of cherries, potatoes and koura (freshwater crayfish) at another village, Moura, on the headland. A short walk through manuka and fern then brought them to the northern tip of sedge-fringed Lake Rotomahana.

The effort was soon rewarded by the sight of Te Tarata, the White Terrace, which appeared a foaming cascade of water turned to stone. “No wit could possibly conceive or execute anything half as beautiful,” wrote Lieutenant T. M. Jones, of the survey ship HMS Pandora. “The constant pouring of the water over [the basins’] edges has rounded them off in the most graceful curves: the incrustations resembling in many places plumes of ostrich feathers in high relief or the beautiful arabesques to be seen on a frosted window pane.”

The broad sinter terrace rose in irregular steps 30 m from the lake to its summit, where a two-metre-thick rim enclosed a steam-wreathed cauldron of boiling water. The overflow from this pool, cascading down the alabaster staircase, filled each basin in turn, creating an array of baths of decreasing temperature. As the water cooled, deposits of silica built up on the scalloped walls, forming intricate patterns and forcing visitors to wear protective moccasins against the sharp new surfaces.
The narrower Pink Terrace consisted for the most part of solid shelves of silica. Cupped pools near the top fringed with stalactites and filled with blue water formed delightful bathing chambers.

The artist Charles Blomfield, whose majestic oil paintings have done much to preserve the memory of the terraces, left an evocative account of a working holiday at Lake Rotomahana with his daughter, Mary, at the height of the tourist boom. Every weekday at about 11 o’clock in the morning, he witnessed groups of “moneyed people” from all parts of the world arrive at the White Terrace and scramble about the glistening silica formations, admiring the tiers of basins, while potatoes and koura were cooked for them in a boiling spring. After lunch the tourists would be conveyed across the lake to the Pink Terrace, where they bathed in its silky waters before heading back to Te Wairoa and a good night’s sleep.