CHAPTER XVIII
THE FIRST CROSSING OF MOUNT COOK
“From depth to height, from height to loftier height
The climber sets his foot and sets his face,
Tracks lingering sunbeams to their resting-place,
And counts the last pulsations of the light:
Strenuous through day, and unsurprised by night,
He runs a race with Time and wins the race.”
Christina Rossetti.
I had been in the hands of my doctor, and had made a good recovery. It was not surprising, therefore, that with renewed health and summer suns there should fall upon me that irresistible longing for the mountains that so often comes across the dreary miles to the city man. In imagination I was already drinking in the champagne air of those higher lands, and seeing, in my mind’s eye, the ever-changing scenes of the Southern Alps. But I had given up all hopes of a climb that year. A week or two later, Mr. Samuel Turner, F.R.G.S., of England, appeared upon the scene and asked Fyfe and myself to join him in an expedition to the Mount Cook district. I was doubtful about attempting big work, so I went back to my doctor. He thumped me in various places, listened carefully to certain interior organs that it is generally supposed should be in good working order for climbing, and said, “Go: it will do you good.” That settled it; though I believe if the doctor had said “No,” I should have gone all the same. Turner and Fyfe had a week’s start of me, and, before I could shake off the shackles of the city, they were already at the Hermitage.
Our coach had a full load of passengers, and the accommodation along the line of route was sorely taxed. “Very comfortable in the laundry,” one man had written in the visitors’ book, and this entry was indicative of the general crush, for there was truth as well as sarcasm in the sentence. Both this hostelry and the one at Mount Cook were in the hands of the Tourist Department, and, like most Government enterprises of the kind, were a dismal failure. Tourists, or the majority of them, do not have votes, and what matters efficiency under a Liberal Government if votes cannot be counted? Much better expend the needed money in some other place where the ballot box looms larger on the political horizon. Vox populi, vox Dei!
The views along the lake-side as we drove towards Aorangi in the early morning were very beautiful, and it was pleasing to note a considerable increase in the bird-life of this region, because as a general rule the feathered tribe of a colony has to bear the brunt of the colonist’s gun. Swan, Paradise and grey duck seemed to abound, while the strutting pukaki, the perky red-bill, and the ubiquitous seagull were also in evidence. As the coach pulled up at the Hermitage, Turner and Fyfe appeared in the doorway. They had attempted the ascent of Mount Sealy in a nor’-wester, and, as was only to be expected, had failed.
Two days later we left the Hermitage and walked up the Tasman Valley, fourteen miles, to the Ball Glacier Hut. Clark, Graham, and Green, of the Hermitage staff, who were packing provisions to the huts, came with us. The skilful way in which Clark managed this portion of his duties was evident even to a novice in the art of transport in rough country. He had reduced it to a science, and, though he declared that the dreadful Hooker River would one day be the death of him, he continued year after year successfully to make these packing pilgrimages with the horses across swollen streams and moraines and avalanche débris to the Ball Glacier Hut, and thence, without horses, over the solid hummocky and crevassed ice to the Malte Brun Hut, far up the Great Tasman Glacier.
The huts were now very comfortable, and I could not help contrasting the changes that had been made since my wife and I first pitched our tent in this rocky wilderness sixteen years before, and carried tents, blankets, and provisions on our own backs along the crumbling moraine and up the trackless valley. We passed the spot where we had bivouacked under the stunted pine tree, and a screech from an impudent kea on the moraine recalled the fact that in those days a slight detour would have been made in order to get him for the pot. Now the keas are preserved to amuse the tourists, and the chief guide, with wonderful celerity, will produce you a four-course dinner that is warranted to satisfy even a Mount Cook appetite. It is true that coloured oilcloth takes the place of spotless damask, and that soups, entrees, etc., are evolved from the mysterious contents of gaudily labelled tins. Nevertheless, after a hard day’s tramp, one is apt to consider it a banquet fit for a king. There is a story current—and it is quite a true one—of two tourists who finished a four-course wine dinner at the Ball Glacier Hut with black coffee and cigars, after which one, looking at the unusual surroundings, remarked quite seriously to his companion, “Bai Jove! We are roughing it, aren’t we?”
Next day we walked up the glacier to the Malte Brun Hut, which we found half buried in snow. A week before it was quite covered, and Clark and Green, coming up with some tourists, had to dig their way down to the door, while inside the hut six candles had to be kept burning all day to give light. Our party was bent on the conquest of Elie de Beaumont, but a storm came up from the north-west, and a heavy fall of snow put climbing out of the question for some days. We decided to retreat to the Ball Hut, and walked down the glacier in the dying storm, the gaunt precipices of the Malte Brun Range looming darkly through the mists, while the murmuring of waterfalls and the roaring of avalanches were borne on the winds across the floor of the glacier.
On Christmas Eve, the weather having cleared, we packed up tent, sleeping bags and provisions, and started across the Tasman Glacier and the Murchison Valley, for a climb on the Liebig Range. Our objective was the Nun’s Veil, a mountain of about 9000 feet. It occupies a commanding position on the range, and Fyfe and I had often expressed a desire to climb it for the sake of the splendid views likely to be obtained. It was a hot walk across the glacier, here almost entirely covered with morainic débris. A solitary kea from the flanks of the Malte Brun Range came and screeched at us, daring us to enter his demesne; but we heeded not his eldritch cries, and descended into the Murchison Valley, the upper portion of which is filled with a fine glacier drawing its supply of ice from an area of 14,000 acres. The Murchison River coming from this eight-mile-long glacier barred our way, but we doffed our nether garments and crossed it in comfort in the garb of Old Gaul. Camp was pitched close to a waterfall that came down in a series of leaps and cascades for fully two thousand feet. It was a most interesting corner. The billy was boiled and supper served round a blazing fire, after which we turned into our sleeping bags inside the Whymper tent.
We slept fairly well till Turner roused us with an attempt to sing “Christians, awake!” and we realized that it was Christmas morn. Turner had the billy boiled—an hour too soon, but that was a detail—and, breakfast finished, we waited for the dawn. Then a start was made up the steep slopes of a spur on the Liebig Range. The waterfall on our right came down in magnificent leaps. At our feet the Murchison River, in numerous branches, wandered over its stony bed, and north and north-east hundreds and hundreds of rocky peaks and ice-clothed mountains cleft the sky. Directly opposite, across the valley, the splendid mass of Mount Cook filled the view above the boulder-strewn glacier. Presently the sun caught its upper snows and grim precipices, bathing them in a warm ethereal tint—the despair alike of the artist and of the writer. The rosy flush crept slowly down the slopes, and then faded as it came, giving place to a wonderfully delicate pearly grey with just the faintest trace of warmth in it. This in turn vanished, and then, as Phœbus came boldly up above the eastern mountain-tops, the snows of Aorangi were changed to gleaming silver. It was a sunrise to be remembered.
A detailed description of this climb would only bore the reader unacquainted with Alpine heights. Suffice it then to say that the ridge that from below looked a “cake-walk” became very much broken, and gave us some interesting rock-work. Fyfe, who was, of course, in his element, decided to keep to the arête, and gain the snow slopes higher up; but Turner urged a deviation, and, somewhat reluctantly, we descended a snow couloir, flanked on either side by magnificent precipices. This detour lost us five hundred feet of elevation, and the climb became, for an hour or more, a weary snow trudge. The main arête was regained only to find that we were completely cut off from the Nun’s Veil. We therefore had to be content with the first ascent of the nearest peak—Mount Beret, 8761 feet, which is the highest point of the rocky Priest’s Cap. The final climb was interesting, especially the crossing of one narrow snow ridge, on which there was just room to stand. On either hand the snow slope swept sharply down to great bergschrunds that yawned below. From the summit of our peak the view of Mount Cook was magnificent—probably the finest in all the Southern Alps—and, towards the north-east, there was a most glorious panorama of mountain peaks that seemed to stretch for over a hundred miles, till the more distant were lost in a haze of bluish-grey. The weather was still unsettled, and a cold wind had arisen; but we secured some very interesting photographs. On the descent we got two thousand feet of glissading, and reached camp early in the afternoon. We packed up, waded the Murchison River, crossed the Tasman Glacier, and were back in the Ball Hut just before nightfall, after fifteen hours’ fairly hard work—an easy day for an invalid!
We now began to cast longing eyes toward Mount Cook, the first “colling” of which—i.e. the climbing to the highest summit on one side, and the descending on the other side—we had resolved to attempt. This was no ordinary undertaking, and it was necessary that we should take no chances either in regard to weather or equipment. The weather, however, was not yet quite settled, and another difficulty in the way was Mr. Turner’s boot. While the chief guide at the Hermitage was hammering some nails into it, he gave the heel a tap with the hammer, and the heel came off! The boot was sent post-haste to the nearest shoemaker—ninety-six miles away. It was now due back at the Hermitage, and Fyfe went down for it—a 28-mile journey there and back. Meanwhile Turner did his walking and climbing in a pair of my Alpine boots, I, luckily, having taken the precaution to bring a second pair with me. Turner and I were left in the hut, and during these two days, in addition to doing the cooking and washing-up, I managed to find time to make a collection of beetles and butterflies for my friend, Mr. Percy Buller of Wellington.
On Wednesday, December 27, accompanied by Dr. Fitchett of Wellington, we proceeded up the Tasman Glacier to the Malte Brun Hut, where we found a party, consisting of Mr. and Mrs. Longton of Christchurch, Miss von Dadelszen, Miss Hickson, and Mr. W. M‘Intosh of Wellington, under the leadership of Graham, one of the Hermitage guides. These huts have only two rooms, and the bunks—four in each room—are like steamers’ berths, one above the other. One room is supposed to be reserved for ladies; the men’s room does for bedroom, kitchen, dining-room, and drawing-room by turns. The problem of housing seven men and three women in these two four-berth cabins had to be solved by one of the men taking a bunk in the ladies’ room, and two of our party sleeping on the floor in the men’s room. This central portion of the Southern Alps was becoming such a popular tourist resort that problems of this nature not infrequently presented themselves, and further accommodation, both at the huts and at the Hermitage, was urgently required.
Fyfe having returned with the much-travelled boot, we were ready for more serious work, and on the 29th December were astir at 1.15 a.m., preparing breakfast. An hour later two climbing parties might have been seen marching by lantern-light in single file down the path that leads from the hut to the Upper Tasman Glacier, 500 feet below, one party consisting of Mr. and Mrs. Longton, Dr. Fitchett, Mr. M‘Intosh, and Graham, being bound for the Hochstetter Dome, 9179 feet high, while our party was bent upon making the first ascent of Elie de Beaumont, a fine snow-clad mountain of 10,200 feet. The day was not promising. While we were having breakfast, a fitful wind had soughed ominously about the hut, and by the time we had proceeded about two miles up the glacier, and before it was yet dawn, this wind had increased in strength, and was blowing steadily. The great mountains around us seemed dwarfed in the feeble light before the dawning, and the cold, grey snows of the Minarets, Mount Green, Mount Walter, and Elie de Beaumont loomed ghost-like against the western sky. Eastward, the serrated ridge of Mount Darwin, and the dark precipices of Malte Brun frowned on us from heights of over nine thousand and ten thousand feet respectively. The rounded snows of the Hochstetter Dome closed in the view at the head of the great ice-filled valley. The snow on the glacier was hard with a night’s freezing, and we made quick progress over its gently sloping, even surface. The sunrise on the Tasman peaks was devoid of the beautiful rosy tints that one so often sees in Alpine regions; but far away down the valley beyond the Ben Ohau Range, where the storm-clouds now gathered in great companies and battalions, there was a gorgeous and even a theatrical display, the mountain-tops and the distant cloud-land appearing as if lit up by some great conflagration, or the glowing fires of some vast volcano. Just as day was dawning, Graham halted to rope up his party for the ascent of the Dome, while we swung round to the left in the direction of our mountain.
Easy snow slopes broken by an occasional crevasse led us towards the foot of Mount Walter, from which “The Times” Glacier takes its rise on the western side. This fine peak (9507 feet) and Mount Green (8704 feet) rise from the main glacier, two glorious spires of rock, and ice, and snow, forming, with the pure dome of Elie de Beaumont, a magnificent Alpine view that dominates the head of the Great Tasman Glacier. The approach to the upper snows of our mountain was guarded by deep crevasses, great gaping bergschrunds, and gigantic séracs, and through and up these we had to thread our way. The snow was in bad condition, and the climb became a weary grind. Fyfe and Turner led alternately, and I, being in the middle of the rope, had little to do but follow my leader. Some great ice-cliffs on the left coming down from the shoulder of Mount Walter looked dangerous, and we gave them as wide a berth as possible. As we climbed past them on the right, a great ice avalanche fell away below us, crashing with thundering roar on to the glacier some distance to the left of our line of route. Ahead, the face of Elie de Beaumont presented a fine sight with its towering walls of ice and steep snow slopes. On the whole line of the ascent we could see no sign of any rock to contrast with the delicate harmonies of green and blue and white.
Mount Walter.
Beyond the corner of Mount Walter there was an interesting little bit of work in threading a way past great blocks of ice and gaping schrunds; but, generally speaking, the climb was uninteresting. It is a climb to do once, but never a second time. We dodged round a steep sloping ice-block, and ascended a fairly easy snow slope, only to find the way barred by a bergschrund—a crevasse with one lip lower than the other. This schrund, however, was narrow enough to permit of our jumping over it, and, though it was a case of jumping up, we had little difficulty in crossing it.
It is very rare for two parties to be climbing together within sight of each other in the Southern Alps, because in New Zealand we have not yet got to that stage in which, as Whistler put it, you can both admire the mountain and recognize the tourist on the top. It was a decided novelty, therefore, to watch the Longton party gradually ascending higher and higher on the Hochstetter Dome. By the time we had crossed this bergschrund we could see them—five small dots—like flies, sheltering from the cold wind on the lee side of the ridge leading to the lower peak of the Dome. They, wisely, did not attempt the higher peak.
When we had gained a height of 9000 feet, the cold north-wester, at this altitude blowing with considerable violence, struck us with full force, and whisked clouds of snow and fine particles of ice in our faces. The mist was also pouring over the main divide, and the Longton party, who were watching us from their distant sheltered ridge, now saw us disappearing into the clouds. Really, we should have turned at this point, but Turner was very anxious to climb a virgin peak, and, while he led up the frozen slope, we two followed meekly in his uncertain wake. Soon the clouds and the driving snow grew so dense that we could see only a very few yards ahead, and the line of route became quite obscured. The wind also increased in violence, and once or twice we had to cling to the frozen slope with the aid of our ice-axes. The wind was bitterly cold, and icicles hung from Turner’s moustache and half-grown beard. For about an hour we climbed upward in this blizzard, without any likelihood of a view, and with a very good chance of not being able to follow the proper route on the descent. Besides, we could not tell what dangers lay ahead, so at last Turner gave the word to retreat. During a momentary rent in the driving cloud, we got a glimpse of the last bergschrund, which runs round the final ice-cap of the mountain, so that we were only some four hundred feet below the summit, and all the real difficulties of the climb had been overcome. Another half an hour in fine weather, and we should have topped our peak; but a first ascent cannot be claimed till the actual summit is under foot—at all events by any true sportsman—and therefore, though only a few hundred feet of easy step-cutting on the final ice-cap remained to be done, we retired defeated.
As we turned, the swirling cloud and snow became denser, and I was fearful lest we should not find our way back. All I could see was my two shivering companions and the Alpine rope that connected the party. As it was, the drifting snow had completely obliterated our upward steps, and we got off the proper line; but we climbed downward as quickly as possible, trusting to the general direction of the slopes to bring us right in the end. There was not, however, a great deal of room to come and go on, and the great walls and blocks of broken ice loomed through the fog, looking nearly twice their actual size, and more formidable than ever. At length Fyfe found a landmark in the sloping sérac round which we had climbed on the ascent, and, thereafter, we were able to keep the route fairly well. Just below this sérac Turner started a glissade, but the slope—hard rough ice under a very thin coating of snow—was unsuitable for glissading, and, after whizzing down a few feet, I had the misfortune to strike a hard block in the ice, and was doubled up in an instant with a bruise on my left hip, another on my right knee, and a third on the bone just above the right ankle. Using my ice-axe as a brake, I shouted to the leader, and quickly pulled up; but not till Fyfe, who was glissading behind, had almost cannoned on to me. After this experience, we proceeded more cautiously till we had passed the dangerous corner at the foot of Walter Peak, where the fog thinned out, and we could see more clearly. The rest was a trudge down the glacier to the hut. Turner proudly carried the icicles on his moustache right into the hut. We had been going steadily for nine hours without halting to eat or drink, and we were glad of hot soup and other luxuries that Graham provided out of the Government locker.
All the others, including two tourists who had come up with Clark, returned to the Ball Hut that afternoon; but we remained behind to make another attempt to conquer Elie de Beaumont. Next day the weather was still threatening; but we marched off again, only to turn after proceeding a little way up the glacier. We resolved to try once more on the morrow, and started by lantern light, this time at 2 a.m. The night had been unusually warm, and Fyfe and I felt convinced that it was useless to persevere, as the snow would be in bad order, and there was a nor’-wester brewing. In deference to Turner’s wishes, however, we went on; but we never touched our mountain that day. The snow was soft and slushy, and, after a weary, uninteresting trudge, we reached a point above the Lendenfeld Saddle—8000 feet above sea-level. The nor’-wester had covered the West Coast with cloud; but Fyfe and I were glad of the opportunity of looking down the pass we made from the head of the Great Tasman Glacier to the West Coast six years before. Many memories of that somewhat daring exploit were recalled, and, as we looked over the steep walls of splintered rock and broken ice, we now wondered how we had got down.
In an icy-cold wind we trudged wearily back through the soft snow to the Malte Brun Hut. The weather was bad as ever, so, after some food and a rest, we retreated down the glacier to the Ball Hut. Fyfe had a skinned heel, Turner had sore feet, and I had a bad ankle. Again we had suffered defeat: Elie de Beaumont hid his snowy summit in the clouds, defiant and unconquered, and the ascent of Mount Cook seemed still afar off.
On our arrival at the Ball Glacier Hut we found it already occupied by a party consisting of Professor Baldwin Spencer of Melbourne, Mr. and Mrs. Lindon of Geelong Grammar School, and Mr. L. Stott, junior, of Melbourne. Clark had come up with them, as had also the coach-driver and the stableman, so that the hut was again full to overflowing, with the result that three men had to sleep in the ladies’ room, while Clark and Fyfe dossed on the floor of the men’s room, in which all the bunks were already occupied. So far as we were concerned, it was evident that our party would be the better for a rest; but even had we been bent upon another climb, the weather would again have prevented it.
That night the nor’-wester developed in force, and, accompanied by heavy rain, howled round the hut. Turner and Fyfe, the coach-driver and the stableman, returned to the Hermitage, but I was unable to accompany them, and remained behind to treat my now swollen ankle with hot fomentations and bandaging. Nevertheless, I spent a very pleasant day in the company of the Professor, Mr. and Mrs. Lindon, Mr. Stott, and Clark. Our expedition was evidently, for various reasons, becoming an ill-starred one, and the congenial company of my new-found friends came like a ray of sunshine through the gloom.
In the afternoon the weather cleared, and, as it was New Year’s Day, we celebrated the event with a four-course dinner, served up in Clark’s best style. The menu consisted of soup, fried sardines, cold mutton, and hot plum pudding, with cocoa (decidedly good) à la Baldwin Spencer. The best of the Professor was that you would never know he was a professor, and it was some time before it dawned upon me that he might be, and indeed was, the man who had been guilty of an erudite treatise on a rudimentary eye in the tuatara lizard, and the author of a valuable work on the Australian aboriginals! Evidently I was in luck’s way—he might have been just an ordinary tourist, or a climber who regarded the mountains very much in the nature of greased poles, to be climbed for his own glorification and profit. On the contrary, the new visitors were charmed with the New Zealand Alps, and it was a great delight to Clark and myself to find such a whole-souled appreciation of our mountain glories, and no attempt at belittlement or vain comparison.
That evening there was a wonderful sunset, and we all stood outside the hut watching the gorgeous and ever-changing pageantry of cloud-land. In front of De la Bêche—most beautiful of mountains—and the spotless snows of the Minarets, far up the ice-filled valley, great rounded cumuli came sailing across from the north-west, like huge balls of glowing fire. The southern sky was glorious with higher clouds of spun gold and burnished copper, and the heavens themselves were tinted with yellow and amber, in the distance exquisitely shaded by some master-hand into delicate ethereal greens and blues. The ever-changing tints formed marvellous and wonderful harmonies. The stony grey wall of the moraine fronting the hut was splashed with the sombre green of the Alpine herbage, and across the glacier, high above the level of the moraine, the rugged rock peaks of the Malte Brun Range were tinged with dull rose, their bold perpendicular slabs silhouetted against a sky of lapis lazuli flecked with exquisite wisps of thin cloud. The colours changed quickly; the clouds, sailing past De la Bêche in the dying nor’-wester, lost their fire; the spun gold, the lapis lazuli, and the delicate peacock blues and greens gave place to sombre grey. The air grew chilly, so we went into the hut, and chatted around the fire till bedtime. Thus passed our New Year’s Day.
On the 2nd January my friends departed for the Malte Brun Hut, eight miles up the glacier, and I was left alone. Even the keas and the two sea-gulls, who had interested and amused us during the previous day, had gone upon a winged pilgrimage. I did some washing and mending, cooked my meals, washed the dishes, tidied the hut, wrote up my journal, made a beetle trap with an empty tin sunk in the ground, fed the carrier pigeon left by Clark, and read Rider Haggard’s Jess, which I found in the hut, for the second time. The weather grew worse, and in the afternoon snow fell in big flakes.
On the 3rd January the programme was much the same. This day I continued the hot fomentations on my ankle, and succeeded in reducing the swelling considerably. I had no watch, so I gauged the time by my hunger, and determined to satisfy the inner man with some of the delicacies in the Government larder. “Hare soup” rather appealed to one, and a tin was opened, only to find that it contained stewed kidneys! I pitched it over the hut and opened a tin labelled “Curried mutton chops”; but once more the label was a lie, and there stood revealed stewed kidneys. That tin with its contents also went over the roof of the hut, as did a third delicacy that existed only in the imagination of the packer. I was going through the same trial that my wife and I had gone through at the De la Bêche Bivouac several years before, and found, afterwards, that my experience was not at all an unusual one. Finally I made a dish of hot macaroni soup (put up by another firm), to which I added green peas tinned in Paris, and this, with bread, made a sumptuous repast. The weather was still unsettled, the barometer standing at 27·14, and the thermometer at 46 degrees.
The keas and the gulls returned in the evening, and one of the keas came inside the hut and walked about, cocking his head knowingly from side to side as if he were taking an inventory of the furniture, and reckoning what it would fetch at an auction sale. There were in all nine keas, and they went through the most comical antics, chattering in their quaint kea language, dancing on the rocks, and even kissing one another. As the night wore on they became a decided nuisance, glissading down the iron roof, and picking up and dropping the empty meat tins behind the hut. The tin-dropping business, with its noisy rattle, seemed to entertain them hugely, but the sleepy mountaineer inside the hut could not see where the fun came in, so he got up and hurled imprecations and stones at them. They replied to the imprecations with some of their own invective, and the stone-throwing, instead of scaring, only amused them. However, I had my revenge, for a random shot laid one of them low. I picked him up and put him in a box, just outside the door, with the intention of skinning him in the morning. Then all the other keas gathered together in a committee meeting a few yards off and jabbered away to one another about this strange big featherless animal who threw stones. I know I was roundly condemned. And the mate of the dead kea came up to the box, and pecked at it, and crooned eerily over the corpse till I felt a perfect brute, and went off to bed again, but was unable to sleep.
Thereupon I fell to moralizing upon the pleasures and penalties of mountaineering. Apart from the actual joy of climbing, it gives the opportunity of beholding Nature in her most sublime and most glorious moods. Sir Martin Conway agrees in this, but adds a word of warning. “The climber,” he says, “pits his life against Nature’s forces, and dares them to take it. He can do so with impunity if he knows enough, and has enough skill. He will get the better of Nature every time, and to an almost dead certainty; but if he does not know enough, or lacks skill, sooner or later Nature will win the trick.” Skill, knowledge, and text-books are supposed to have hurled the dangers of mountaineering almost into the unknown. But Mummery, that most brilliant cragsman—whose own unknown grave lies somewhere among the snows of the giant Himalayas—in his delightful book about his climbs in the Alps and Caucasus, says he cannot forget that the first guide to whom he was ever roped, and one who possessed more knowledge of mountains than is to be found even in the Badminton Library, was none the less killed on the Brouillard Mont Blanc, and his son, subsequently, on Koshtantau. Then the memory of two rollicking parties, comprising seven men, who one day in 1879 were climbing on the west face of the Matterhorn, passes with ghost-like admonition before his mind, and bids him remember that of these seven Mr. Penhall was killed on the Wetterhorn, Ferdinand Imseng on the Macugnaga Monte Rosa, and John Petrus on the Fresnay Mont Blanc. In New Zealand the early pioneers of Alpine climbing have done good work without guides and without accident, and in thus quoting two such famous authorities as Conway and Mummery I have no wish to in any way discourage the practice of so ennobling a sport, but rather to enjoin caution and pains to acquire proficiency. “High proficiency,” as Mummery again points out, “is only attainable when a natural aptitude is combined with long years of practice. It is true the great ridges sometimes demand their sacrifice; but the mountaineer would hardly forgo his worship though he knew himself to be the destined victim. But, happily, to most of us the great brown slabs bending over into immeasurable space, the lines and curves of the wind-moulded cornice, the delicate undulations of the fissured snow, are old and trusted friends, ever luring us to health and fun and laughter, and enabling us to bid a sturdy defiance to all the ills that time and life oppose.”
But I have been led by the lonely hut and its surroundings into a moralizing mood. Let me therefore come back from the great peaks and descend to the valley, for the next morning the former were hidden in the clouds, and even the valley was filled with gloom. Fyfe and Turner had not returned. I felt lonelier than ever, and formed a strong conviction that man is a gregarious animal. Having come to this conclusion, I cooked myself a late breakfast of bacon and onions, and a little later went out and saw the Professor and his party striding down the moraine from the Upper Tasman. In a few minutes the billy was singing on the fire, and then, over a cup of hot coffee with my friends, I became once more a sociable being and all the world was rose-coloured. The visitors resolved to go to the Hermitage in the afternoon. I decided to walk a few miles down the valley with them, and then, tempted by the pleasant company and thoughts of the luxurious ease of the Hermitage, I was persuaded to accompany them all the way. By the time I had done ten miles my ankle was again bad, and, an hour or two later, I limped into the Hermitage, dead lame, and fully convinced that my climbing for that season was at an end.