Still Growing in the Dark

The lost eighth wonder of the world

“You are meddling with things you don’t understand.” You actually said this to me, like some cartoon villain.

Neither of us arranged it. You turned from an airport departures board and found me reading the same one, and for a moment we both forgot to move. You recovered first. I saw the glance toward my bag, and the tension in your posture. Were you weighing how it would look, accosting a woman in public?

Then you said your line. Unironically.

***

Lake Rotomahana. The Pink and White Terraces stood here once, in the thermal country at the center of New Zealand’s North Island. People crossed the world to bathe in the pink pools. They wrote home that old ailments had cleared, that they looked younger than when they arrived. I knew the reason from the pieces I carried.

On the tenth of June, 1886, Mount Tarawera opened along its length and buried the terraces, the lake, and the villages on its shores. The greatest wonder in the country was gone before morning.

I see your institution has been involved here for a while. In 1859 a surveyor named Ferdinand von Hochstetter stood on this shore and wrote down his bearings in careful columns of degrees. Your people had found it. They were coming for it. The volcano got there first. Whatever you meant to lift from these waters went down with everything else, and you have spent the century since making sure no one could follow the trail.

***

The water is closed to the public. Since there is nothing “public” about actions taken in secret, your rule obviously didn’t apply.

After dark I took an inflatable onto the lake and followed the pieces. I dropped over the side and watched a temperature probe to stay off the vents, which would boil a diver who drifted into them. Sixty metres down, in the dark, a terrace of pink stone was building, hidden since 1886.

The healing was real, exactly what the tourists described. A cut I had carried for days was gone. The skin on the backs of my hands looked younger, after. My air gauge did not move the whole dive. Nothing runs out down there. Not the air, not the clock. A person could stay and never notice they were not coming up.

As I suspected, it was encased deep in the silica, and I had to use tools to extract it.

***

You said I don't understand what I am doing. Honesty, then, since you raised it. I do not. Neither do you, I expect. You don't understand them, so you contain them, and warn off the curious. I don't understand them, so I cannot stop until I do.

— N.

The Pink and White Terraces (Ōtukapuarangi, “fountain of the clouded sky,” and Te Tarata) were silica sinter formations on Lake Rotomahana, the largest known and the colonial Pacific’s most celebrated sight. The 1886 Tarawera eruption killed around 120 people, most of them Māori of the Tūhourangi and Ngāti Rangitihi, whose descendants remain in the district. The terraces were thought destroyed until 2017, when researchers used the Austrian geologist Ferdinand von Hochstetter’s 1859 survey notes to argue their location could be found again.