Page:A New Zealand verse (1906).pdf/79
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The Pink and White Terraces.
43
To mark the hundred baths in view—
Crystalline azure, snowy-rimmed—
The marge of every beauteous pond
Curve after curve—each lower beyond
The higher—outsweeping white and wide,
Like snowy lines of foam that glide
O’er level sea sands lightly skimmed
By thin sheets of the glistening tide.
They climb those milk-white flats incrusted
And netted o’er with wavy ropes
Of wrinkled silica. At last—
Each basin’s heat increasing fast—
The topmost step the pair surmount,
And lo, the cause of all! Around,
The circling cliffs a crater bound—
Cliffs damp with dark-green moss—their slopes
All crimson-stained with blots and streaks—
White-mottled and vermilion-rusted;
And in the midst, beneath a cloud
That ever upward rolls and reeks
And hides the sky with its dim shroud,
Look where upshoots a fuming fount—
Up through a blue and boiling pool
Perennial—a great sapphire steaming,
In that coralline crater gleaming.
Upwelling ever, amethystal,
Ebullient comes the bubbling crystal!
Still growing cooler and more cool
As down the porcelain stairway slips
The fluid flint, and slowly drips,
And hangs each basin’s curling lips
With crusted fringe each year increases,
Thicker than shear-forgotten fleeces;
More close and regular than rows,
Long rows of snowy trumpet-flowers
Some day to hang in garden-bowers,
Crystalline azure, snowy-rimmed—
The marge of every beauteous pond
Curve after curve—each lower beyond
The higher—outsweeping white and wide,
Like snowy lines of foam that glide
O’er level sea sands lightly skimmed
By thin sheets of the glistening tide.
They climb those milk-white flats incrusted
And netted o’er with wavy ropes
Of wrinkled silica. At last—
Each basin’s heat increasing fast—
The topmost step the pair surmount,
And lo, the cause of all! Around,
The circling cliffs a crater bound—
Cliffs damp with dark-green moss—their slopes
All crimson-stained with blots and streaks—
White-mottled and vermilion-rusted;
And in the midst, beneath a cloud
That ever upward rolls and reeks
And hides the sky with its dim shroud,
Look where upshoots a fuming fount—
Up through a blue and boiling pool
Perennial—a great sapphire steaming,
In that coralline crater gleaming.
Upwelling ever, amethystal,
Ebullient comes the bubbling crystal!
Still growing cooler and more cool
As down the porcelain stairway slips
The fluid flint, and slowly drips,
And hangs each basin’s curling lips
With crusted fringe each year increases,
Thicker than shear-forgotten fleeces;
More close and regular than rows,
Long rows of snowy trumpet-flowers
Some day to hang in garden-bowers,