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Updated: May 7, 2025
The storehouses recalled those of the Bulungan, with their wide wooden rings around the tops of the supporting pillars, to prevent mice from ascending. Outside of the fence near the jungle two water-buffaloes were always to be seen in the forenoon lying in a mud-pool; these we were warned against as being dangerous.
Now, the post, dingy and shattered and worn from the frequent contact of wheels, and gnawing of restless horses, leaned from its trim perpendicular at an angle of many degrees, as if ashamed of the faded, weather-worn, lying symbol it bore aloft in the sunshine. Around the post was a filthy mud-pool, in which a hog lay grunting out its sense of enjoyment.
At one of the smaller, marginal jets which I managed to approach, I held my hand to see if it was really as hot as it looked, when a little drop of mud that spurted on to my finger scalded like boiling water. A short distance off, there was a flat bare surface of rock as smooth and hot as an oven floor, which was evidently an old mud-pool, dried up and hardened.
Here they found the cause of the noise, for as they approached there was a tiny jet of steam issuing from one side near the dense growth of a peculiar grass, and when this had been whistling for about a minute, another jet burst out on the other side, whistling in the different key, while in the middle of the mud-pool there was a quivering and rifting of the surface, followed by the formation of a huge bubble, which kept on rising up larger and larger till it was a big globe of quite two feet high, when it suddenly burst with a peculiar sound, as if someone had said the word Beff! in a low whisper.
All of them menaced, at first the hundred and eighty autocrats who, before the concentration of the revolutionary government, ruled for eight months boundlessly in the provinces; next, and above all, the fifty hard-fisted "Montagnards," unscrupulous fanatics or authoritarian high livers, who, at this moment, tread human flesh under foot and spread out in arbitrariness like wild boars in a forest, or wallow in scandal, like swine in a mud-pool.
Pillars of steam rose here and there, and all at once he started aside as a gurgling noise arose from beyond a patch of vivid green which covered the edges of a mud-pool, so hot that it was painful to the hand. From time to time Ngati had stopped to listen, the shouts growing fainter each time, while, as they progressed, a heavy thunderous roar grew louder, died away, and grew louder again.
This occurred several times before they went on, having vainly searched the borders of the mud-pool for footmarks; and at the end of another few hundred yards loud hissing and shrieking noises led them to another pool, but, far from being so quiescent as that which they had left behind, this was all in commotion.
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