“WATERS OF HELL.”

Hokitika Guardian, 18 May 1926, Page 1

“WATERS OF HELL.”

N.Z. VOLCANIC REGION. GERMAN WRITERS’ APPRECIA TION. LONDON, April 10. “Sterbendo Welt,” the hook on New Zealand hy Andreas Rei6chek, edited by his son, seems to have gained popularity in Austria and Germany. About a hundred newspapers, including all the most important, have had flattering notices of the book. Dr Richard A. Bermann (“Arnold Hoellriegel”), of Vienna, a noted European journalist and author, who was recently out in New Zealand, was asked by a hookreview (among other leading authors), “Which book of the year has male the strongest impression on you?” Dr Bermann replied: “I will satisfy myself with mentioning without comparison or order, or without wishing to how preference over other books, Hvo of especial excellence; the first, which is in great demand, Andreas Reischek’s book about New Zealand. People Fke it, although it is a shy, modest, rather simple sort of book—yet it is splendid, full of a wanderlust, Natu-e----longing simplicity.” Sterbende Welt ’ induced Dr Bermann to undertake his Pacific voyage. In a recent number of Do “B'-r----liner Taegblatt,” Dr Bermann has a long account of the volcanic lake district of New Zealand. “I close my eyes,” says the writer, “and try to form a mental picture, hut it is nothing but a blur of steam impelled from thousands and thousands of boiling ' abysses. This open stretch of country around Rotorua is for more than 100 kilometres round so broken and steaming and active that the collective picture that remains with me is that of a great boiling hearth full of innumerable pot through which I had been steering about in a motor car. T can easily pronounce the most beautiful sounding names (which my readers cannot): Tikitere, Wairakoi, Wairoa; Karapiti. They all mean steam, steam, steam in many lonely and hidden valleys, or roaring up 'through the large creeks, the gathering of the waters of hell. I have gone over the indescribable lake, Rotomahana, whose desolate banks stink and steam like those of the Acheron, but whose waters are so blue that I watch with delight in the blue reflection the flight of a snow-white gull, winging its way over. UNACCOUNTABLE) WONDERS. “We European, _wlio cook things with water, which we must boil on an ordinary hearth, how proud wo are in our ridiculous way of every drop of warm water which anywhere trickles out of our tired earth. In the thermal district of the North Island of New Zealand, as well as in other parts of the country, hot and tepid and cold mineral prings are so frequent that nobody has ever counted them. . . -the majority of them have never been analsyed at all. Nevertheless a book by a learned English balneologist which I have read enumerates no fewer than eighty New Zealand springs, thermal ones like those of Gnstoin, and, according to Dr Herel>rt, ill every way superior to those much described mineral waters. He knows of thirteen New Zealand springs similar to tlio waters of Wiesbaden, only that they aro richer and better be proves bv chemical analysis. He knows of fifteen springs like those of Krcuznacli, and five others which arc of the nature ol Vicliy, only they surpass Vichy. No fewer than 35 places have waters like Spa (one is called The Devil’s Eyeglass) ; and the number of sulphur, boracic, iodine, arsenic. soda and iron springs is innumerable, of a number anyway infinitely greater than that of the mud baths. “WELL OF BIMINI.”

“Tn Rotorua they have at least a dozen hot mineral springs of different kinds situated round a wonderful Kurpark (sanatorium park), with opallike geysers instead of springs; they have a pretentious and detestable sanatorium and many simple wooden bath-houses containing swimming pools, and naturally warm showerbaths and bathing facilities of all kinds. Tt seems that here above all others rheumatic and neurotic people are really cured, perhaps by the hatlis and the mineral waters, perhaps by the divinely Italian climate, or hy the wholesome monotony of this bathing place, which in true New Zealand fashion is thoroughly honest and unexciting. Half a dozen wooden streets with good shops, four or five cinemas, and numbers of commodious boarding houses, in which meat is served up four times daily, and seven times, yes, truly, tea seven times daily. “But. if you make your way a little bit deeper into the park, where hy the lakeside you lose yourself in a halftropical jungle of blossoming shrubs, thou you will find yourself on a crust of literally hot earth; boro you will see a spring of sulphur water flowing, and there iodine water, or else some other spring, unknown, which no doctor has yet employed nor no chemist, analysed. This bubbling pool may he a potential Gastein, that may, why not, become one day more famous than the Karlsbad spring. And yon step carefully over the soft unsteady earth, dreaming that you might suddenly sink into a quite new and wonderful water; and it would he this, look you. the so-long-souglit-for Well of Bimini, the Well of Eternal Youth.’'