The range of Mount Tarawera seemed to be in full volcanic activity,
including some craters supposed to be extinct, and embracing an area of
one hundred and twenty miles by twenty.
The showers of dust were so thick as to turn day into night for nearly
two days. Some lives were lost, and several villages were destroyed,
these being covered ten feet deep with ashes, dust and clayey mud. The
volcanic phenomena were of the most violent character, and the whole
island appears to have been more or less convulsed. Mount Tarawera is
said to be five hundred feet higher than before the eruption; glowing
masses were thrown up into the air, and tongues of fiery hue, gases or
illuminated vapors, five hundred feet wide, towered up one thousand feet
high. The mountain was 2,700 feet in height.
TARAWERA IN ERUPTION
This eruption presented a spectacle of rarely-equalled grandeur.
To travelers and strangers the greatest resultant loss will be the
destruction of those world-famous curiosities, the white and pink
terraces, in the vicinity of Lake Rotomahana and the region of the
famous geysers. The natives have a superstition that the eruption of the
extinct Tarawera was caused by the profanation of foreign footsteps. It
was to them a sacred place, and its crater a repository for their dead.
The first earthquake occurred in this region. One side of the mountain
fell in, and then the eruption began. The basin of the lake was broken
up and disappeared, but again reappeared as a boiling mud cauldron;
craters burst out in various places, and the beautiful terraces were no
more.
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