Pullman Herald

Pullman Herald.

PULLMAN, W. T.

MURIATIC ACID LAKE.

The Seething, Bubbling Mineral Mass Found on White Island.

White Island is nearly circular and about three miles in circumference, writes an Auckland correspondent of the San Francisco Chronicle. It consists of tall cliffs on three sides formed of rock and loose rubbish thrown up from the crater. On the fourth side is a large flat many acres in extent, broken in two places by tall and fantastically rocky eminences which appear to have once formed part of the cliffs in which the flats would seem to be a fault. These cliffs are eight hundred feet in height, perpendicular within and gently sloping to the sea. Before you is a vast amphitheater of extraordinary tint. The walls of this basin, towering up to the sky, appear serrated at the edges and intersected along the face by an inextricable net-work of fissures and crevices. Landed in the ship's dinghy on the boulder-strewn beach, we find ourselves within the awe-inspiring inclosure of this wonderful plain. A large plain of mineral deposit is before one, and on the right is seen a tramway leading up to what is known as the Alumint reef. In the center of this plain is the wonderful boiling lake. As we approach it along a well-beaten track the ground becomes chocolate color, and all at once the visitor is conscious of the most pungent odors as the fumes from the surface of the boiling lake and the base of the surrounding walls of rock reach him. A few steps more and a magnificent scene bursts upon the view. Below you lies the most extraordinary tinted picture that poet, artist, explorer, novelist, tourist or special ever gazed upon. The general tone of the ground line is of a deep chocolate, the walls of rock around of that warm color known to artists as madder brown, relieved with rose madder, the edge of the lake a deep orange and the lake itself a blending of the peculiar green of verdigris and lemon yellow. At the base of the rocks issue jets and clouds of vapor.

The tint of this lake is probably due to the fact that as the volume of water has lessened the chemical properties in the water have become of greater strength, and some predominating over others give the present extraordinary hue. The lake is simply a seething, bubbling mass of muriatic acid, and as the liquid boils up the bubbles have their sides in shadow, reflecting a green tinge, the whole surface emitting a vapor that very soon finds out your lungs and tickles the mucous membrane of your nose and throat, to say nothing of bringing to the eye involuntary tears.

To the right, following the natural pass of the island, is chaos itself—rents, chasms, streams, pools. The sin in frantic confusion, these latter apparently all alive and each one bent on outshining if not outnoising one another. This was a sort of school-room for the apparent education of small volcanoes. And the hissing, sputtering, choking things could be seen here and there what looked like huge, mammoth golden cauliflowers. These were sulphur formation.

No animal or insect breathes upon the island. Two hundred fathoms will hardly reach the bottom within half a mile of its shores. This island is the eastern limit of the extensive belt of volcanic agitation which extends from Mount Egmont through Tongariro, the Taupo Rotomahana lakes to Whale Island and the adjacent rocks north of which line earthquakes are rarely felt.

An analysis of sulphur deposits on this island made in the New Zealand Geological Survey Laboratory shows that one of yellow sulphur contained 99.9 per cent. of sulphur, that another of green sulphur contained 62.5 per cent. sulphur and that a third of impure sulphur contained 62.05 per cent. sulphur. The chief impurity was gypsum, which does not interfere with its distillation.