Not more than fifty feet from Liberty Cap rise the famous Hot Spring Terraces.  They constitute a veritable mountain, covering at least two hundred acres, the whole of which has been, for centuries, growing slowly through the agency of hot water issuing from the boiling springs.  This, as it cools, leaves a mineral deposit, spread out in delicate, thin layers by the soft ripples of the heated flood.  Strange, is it not?  Everywhere else the flow of water wears away the substance that it touches; but here, by its peculiar sediment, it builds as surely as the coral insect.  Moreover, the coloring of these terraces is, if possible, even more marvelous than their creation; for, as the mineral water pulsates over them, it forms a great variety of brilliant hues.  Hot water, therefore, is to this material what blood is to the body.  With it the features glow with warmth and color; without it they are cold and ghostlike.  Accordingly, where water ripples over these gigantic steps, towering one above another toward the sky, they look like beautiful cascades of color; and when the liquid has deserted them, they stand out like a staircase of Carrara marble.  Hence, through the changing centuries, they pass in slow succession, from light to shade, from brilliancy to pallor, and from life to death.  This mineral water is not only a mysterious architect; it is, also, an artist that no man can equal.  Its magic touch has intermingled the finest shades of orange, yellow, purple, red, and brown; sometimes in solid masses, at other places diversified by slender threads, like skeins of multicolored silk.  Yet in producing all these wonderful effects, there is no violence, no uproar.  The boiling water passes over the mounds it has produced with the low murmur of a sweet cascade.  Its tiny wavelets touch the stone work like a sculptor’s fingers, molding the yielding mass into exquisitely graceful forms.

[Illustration:  MINERVA TERRACE.]

The top of each of these colored steps is a pool of boiling water.  Each of these tiny lakes is radiant with lovely hues, and is bordered by a colored coping, resembling a curb of jasper or of porphyry.  Yet the thinnest knife-blade can be placed here on the dividing line between vitality and death.  The contrast is as sudden and complete as that between the desert and the valley of the Nile.  Where Egypt’s river ends its overflow the desert sands begin; and on these terraces it is the same.  Where the life-giving water fails, the golden colors become ashen.  This terraced mountain, therefore, seemed to me like a colossal checker-board, upon whose colored squares, the two great forces, Life and Death, were playing their eternal game.  There is a pathos in this evanescent beauty.  What lies about us in one place so gray and ghostly was once as bright and beautiful as that which we perceive a hundred feet away.  But nothing here retains supremacy.  The glory of this century will be the gravestone of the next.  Around our feet are sepulchres of vanished splendor.  It seems as if the architect were constantly dissatisfied.  No sooner has he finished one magnificent structure than he impatiently begins another, leaving the first to crumble and decay.  Each new production seems to him the finest; but never reaching his ideal, he speedily abandons it to perish from neglect.