illiancy 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.

[Illustration: JUPITER TERRACE.]

[Illustration: "VITALITY AND DEATH."]

It cannot be said of these terraces that "distance lends enchantment
to the view." The nearer you come to them the more beautiful they
appear. They even bear the inspection of a magnifying glass, for they
are covered with a bead-like ornamentation worthy of the goldsmith's
art. In one place, for example, rise pulpits fin