Tiura, the chief’s oldest adopted son, arranged for the journey, and led the four of us who made it.  One was an Australian, a doctor of the bush country of Queensland, in his thirties, very tall, and strong, though thin.  He was a guest of the chief, and had walked entirely around Tahiti, barefooted, as had Mr. and Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson, to the consternation of the conservative English residents of Tahiti, who wanted them to live in Papeete and hold teas.  Two pleasant native youths went with us to carry our necessities.

One cannot make the trip in the wet season, usually, but we had had a period of quite dry weather, and were nearing the end of the rainy period.  The beginning of the Valley of Vaihiria, the next to that of Mataiea, was reached within an hour by the crooked road that leaves the beach.  The valley was very fertile, and its picturesqueness a foretaste of the heights.  The brook that ran through it murmured that it, too, climbed to the mountains, and would be our music on the way.  The ascent was difficult and wearisome.  We walked through long grass, over great rocks, and pulled ourselves around huge trees.  The birds, so rare near the sea-shore, sang to us, and we saw many nests of fine moss.  The scenery was different from that of the Valley of Fautaua, which I had climbed with Fragrance of the Jasmine, more rugged, and less captivating, yet beautiful and inspiring.  The enormous blocks of basalt often poised upon a point alarmed us, and Tiura said that many times they had crashed down into the abyss.  We saw a score of white cascades.  It seemed: 

    A land of streams.  Some like a downward smoke,
    Slow-dropping veils of thinnest lawn, did go;
    And some through wavering lights and shadows broke,
    Rolling a slumbrous sheet of foam below.

We arrived at a plateau after seven hours of hard toil, almost all the time pursuing a rocky path:  it was the crown of the mountain and the borders of the lake.  Though we had surmounted only thirteen hundred feet of vertically, we had come by such steeps that we could not wait an instant before throwing off our light garments and plunging into the water.  The lake occupied an extinct crater, surrounded by four mountains unequally raised up—­Tetufera, Urufaa, Purahu, and Terouotupo.  It is half a mile long and a third wide, of curious shape, the banks making it appear in the dusk like a babe in swaddling-clothes with its arms outside the band.  A great natural reservoir, fed by many subterranean springs, it gives birth to many others at the feet of the mountains, in Mataiea and Papeari.