EGMONT'S EQUAL.

Auckland Star, Volume LIX, Issue 222, 19 September 1928, Page 6

EGMONT'S EQUAL.

An American visitor told the "Star" the other day that in his opinion Taranaki's snow-capped cone is more beautiful than Japan's historic Fujiyama, and that it has a better setting. It has been the fashion to liken Mount Eginont to the Japanese holy mountain, and it is pleasing therefore to know that our lovely peak is the finer of the two. But there is another peak iii taat far sector of the earth that more closely approaches our Taranaki snow peak's symmetry of figure. That mountain is an active volcano Mount Mayon, in Southern Luzon, Philippine Islands. Recent news from the Philippines reported that Mayon was in eruption and that its lava flow had done much damage to the inhabited country on its lower slopes and around its base. Mayon was described by A. Henry Savage Landor in one of his books on Eastern travel as the most beautiful mountain he had ever seen; Fujiyama, he said, "sinks into perfect insignificance by contrast." Mr. Landort photograph of the volcano supports his praise. The peak goes grandly swelling up to a narrow summit just in the manner of Egmont, and curiouely ijs altitude is only fifteen feet greater than that of our noble "Father of Taranaki" (Mayon 8275 fefet, Egmont 8260 feet). In one respect Mayon's outline is more shapely than Egmont's; its sides are unbroken by subsidiary lava peaks like Kangitoto (Fantham's Peak) on the southern elope of Egmont. But Mayon lacks the crowning glory of snow, the ' parawai ma," as the Maoris have it in a eong in praise of Taranaki's purewhite jobe of the finest flax. Mayon rises from near the eea, as Egmont does, but it is close to the tropics, and so it never presents the picture of glittering beauty that Taranaki gives us. And, moreover, our grand old mountain, its fiery stage long ages gone, is a far more comfortable neighbour and overlord than fuming Mayon of the Philippines. jq