Thermal Baths Quotes

You see something beautiful and you can’t believe your eyes. Someone tells you something about…the natural beauty of Iceland…people bathing in thermal springs, among geysers…in fact you’ve seen it in pictures, but still you say you can’t believe it…Although obviously you believe it…Exaggeration is a form of polite admiration…You set it up so the person you’re talking to can say: it’s true…And then you say: incredible. First you can’t believe it and then you think it’s incredible.

There were thermal springs, and at the end of the preceding century the town had been laid out modestly as a spa. Hot water still ran in the bath house. Two old gardeners still kept some order in the ornamental grounds. The graded paths, each with a “view-point,” the ruins of a seat and of a kiosk, where once invalids had taken their

Frank raised his hand for quiet. “Now, I know you two have another long, hard quest ahead of you. There’s still one emperor who needs his podex kicked.” As the crowd chuckled, I wished our next task would be as easy as Frank made it sound. Nero’s podex, yes…but there was also the small matter of Python, my old immortal enemy, presently squatting in my old holy place of Delphi. “And I understand,” Frank continued, “that you two have decided to leave in the morning.” “We have?” My voice cracked. I’d been imagining a week or two relaxing in New Rome, enjoying the thermal baths, maybe seeing a chariot race. “Shh,” Meg told me. “Yes, we’ve decided.” That didn’t make me feel any better. “Also,” Hazel chimed in, “I know you two are planning to visit Ella and Tyson at dawn to receive prophetic help for the next stage of your quest.” “We are?” I yelped. All I could think of was Aristophanes licking his nether regions.

I like rainbows. We came back down to the meadow near the steaming terrace and sat in the river, just where one of the bigger hot streams poured into the cold water of the Ferris Fork. It is illegal – not to say suicidal – to bathe in any of the thermal features of the park. But when those features empty into the river, at what is called a hot pot, swimming and soaking are perfectly acceptable. So we were soaking off our long walk, talking about our favorite waterfalls, and discussing rainbows when it occurred to us that the moon was full. There wasn’t a hint of foul weather. And if you had a clear sky and a waterfall facing in just the right direction… Over the course of a couple of days we hked back down the canyon to the Boundary Creek Trail and followed it to Dunanda Falls, which is only about eight miles from the ranger station at the entrance to the park. Dunanda is a 150-foot-high plunge facing generally south, so that in the afternoons reliable rainbows dance over the rocks at its base. It is the archetype of all western waterfalls. Dunenda is an Indian name; in Shoshone it means “straight down,” which is a pretty good description of the plunge. ... …We had to walk three miles back toward the ranger station and our assigned campsite. We planned to set up our tents, eat, hang our food, and walk back to Dunanda Falls in the dark, using headlamps. We could be there by ten or eleven. At that time the full moon would clear the east ridge of the downriver canyon and would be shining directly on the fall. Walking at night is never a happy proposition, and this particular evening stroll involved five stream crossings, mostly on old logs, and took a lot longer than we’d anticipated. Still, we beat the moon to the fall. Most of us took up residence in one or another of the hot pots. Presently the moon, like a floodlight, rose over the canyon rim. The falling water took on a silver tinge, and the rock wall, which had looked gold under the sun, was now a slick black so the contrast of water and rock was incomparably stark. The pools below the lip of the fall were glowing, as from within, with a pale blue light. And then it started at the base of the fall: just a diagonal line in the spray that ran from the lower east to the upper west side of the wall. “It’s going to happen,” I told Kara, who was sitting beside me in one of the hot pots. Where falling water hit the rock at the base of the fall and exploded upward in vapor, the light was very bright. It concentrated itself in a shining ball. The diagonal line was above and slowly began to bend until, in the fullness of time (ten minutes, maybe), it formed a perfectly symmetrical bow, shining silver blue under the moon. The color was vaguely electrical. Kara said she could see colors in the moonbow, and when I looked very hard, I thought I could make out a faint line of reddish orange above, and some deep violet at the bottom. Both colors were very pale, flickering, like bad florescent light. In any case, it was exhilarating, the experience of a lifetime: an entirely perfect moonbow, silver and iridescent, all shining and spectral there at the base of Dunanda Falls. The hot pot itself was a luxury, and I considered myself a pretty swell fellow, doing all this for the sanity of city dwellers, who need such things more than anyone else. I even thought of naming the moonbow: Cahill’s Luminescence. Something like that. Otherwise, someone else might take credit for it.

Julie took the sheet the Russian genius handed to her, but she hardly looked at it. Thermal equations, with face flannels thrown in, weren't really her thing. But she did marvel at the sight of the fish swimming in her bath. It was one of the most beautiful things she'd seen in a long time.