Text 1: The breathing valley, by Amira Castellanos

An original contemporary travel blog.

The first thing you notice is the smell. Every guidebook warns you about it, and every guidebook understates it. The whole valley smells of rotten eggs, so strongly that for the first ten minutes I breathed through my scarf like a bank robber.

The second thing you notice is that the ground is breathing. Steam rises from cracks in the path, from the banks of the stream, from holes in the hillside, in slow white plumes that drift and vanish. Pools of mud bubble and spit with a fat, lazy plop. One lake is a bright, unnatural turquoise; another is orange around the edges, as if it were rusting. It is like walking around the inside of a giant’s kitchen while the dinner is on.

Visitors stay on wooden boardwalks, and the signs are not subtle: a stick figure falling through the ground into a pot of boiling water. The ranger who leads our walk, Aroha, explains that the crust beside the paths can be as thin as a biscuit, with water at nearly a hundred degrees just beneath. Every year, she says, someone ignores the signs to take a better photograph. She does not say what happens to them. She does not need to.

At eleven o’clock exactly, the geyser at the end of the valley begins to grumble. A few splashes rise from its cone of grey rock, then fall back, then rise higher. The crowd on the viewing platform goes quiet. Then, with a roar like a giant clearing its throat, a column of boiling water shoots twenty metres into the air and hangs there, roaring and steaming, while the spray drifts over us warm as bathwater.

It lasts nearly a minute. When it is over, everyone claps, as if the earth had given a performance. I clapped too. But walking back along the boardwalk, watching the steam rise through the cracks at my feet, I could not shake the feeling that the ground had merely been tolerating us.

Text 2: Among the boiling springs, by Samuel Ridgeway

An original journal written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

In this journal, kept in 1871, a member of a surveying party describes the geysers of a remote valley in the Rocky Mountains of North America.

August 2nd. We have pitched our tents within a quarter of a mile of the great geyser, and I write by the light of the fire with the earth hissing and muttering on every side of me like a kettle about to boil.

No description I had read prepared me for this valley. The ground for a mile around is white and crusted, like a field after a hard frost, and pierced everywhere with holes, from some of which rise clouds of steam, from others jets of scalding water, and from others a dull thumping, as though a great engine were at work far beneath our feet. The pools are of every colour: some of the clearest blue, so that one may look down into them for fifty feet; others yellow, red or green, and smelling abominably of sulphur.

We have no path to keep to and no one to warn us, and the danger is very real. This afternoon Mr Inchley, who was walking a little ahead of me, broke through the crust with his right foot into hot water beneath, and though he pulled it out in an instant, his boot was scalded through and the skin of his ankle raised in blisters. He bore it like a Christian. After that we went forward one at a time, testing every step with the butt of a rifle.

At about six o’clock the great geyser, which had been silent since our arrival, gave notice of its intention with a series of deep rumblings that shook the ground. Then up it went, a column of boiling water and steam, I should judge a hundred and fifty feet high, rising and rising with a roar like a waterfall, until the sun shone through the spray and made a rainbow upon it. We stood bareheaded and shouted like boys. It played for twenty minutes.

Tonight I find myself unable to sleep. It is a strange thing to lie upon ground that is warm beneath one’s blanket and to know that it is hollow.

Both of these texts are about visiting valleys of geysers and boiling springs.

Compare:

• what the writers say about visiting these places
• how the writers present these places to readers

You must use the text to support your comments and make it clear which text you are referring to.