Nature's Royal Salute.

IT is really an excellent thing to have a national volcano on tap, so to say, likely to give a kind of snap to sightseeing life in our greatest National Park. Ngauruhoe cone, which was in eruption last in 1926, was fully due for another ebullition, one of those periodical little explosions of temperamental Ruwai-moko, the god of the underworld, who does not like to be forgotten entirely, but who at the same time doesn't want to hurt anybody. Really we owe a lot to old Ruwaimoko. He has done a vast amount in his time to make our island a place of interest and beauty. To him we owe Egmont, Ruapehu and scores of other lofty and shapely mountains, and hundreds of the lesser cones. And so far from being a place of dread as it was in earlier days, the volcano park is all the more attractive for the dramatic phase of activity of which Ngauruhoe is the cupola and chimney. Up to the moment of writing no human life has ever been lost on Ngauruhoe or around it. There are few other great mountains in New Zealand of which that can be said. Some of us have experienced lively hours on its slopes. But it is essentially a sightseer's safe mountain. It may make a big noise every few years, but really it doesn't mean all it thunders, and most of its occasional vigorous output of rock and ash only goes to build up its own cone.

The old South Taupo Maoris used to say that volcanic rumblings or explosions in their parts of the land often signalled the approach of some great chief, a visitor of high mana. We may take it therefore that Mr. Ruwaimoko received the news of the Duke's coming per earth radio, and so, being a loyal New Zealander, got off his royal salute early.