At length we gained the highest rocks, which proved very bad going and seemed likely to bring us to a stand; but the leading man going up the last fifty feet alone, sent down a spare rope, making one end fast above, by whose assistance the second man followed in safety, the last man making the swags fast to the rope below to be hauled up. In the act of hoisting them, however, one broke away, and commenced a furious flight down the slopes up which we had so laboriously toiled. To the swag was attached a pannikin and the tin cistern of our lamp stove, and at every bound we could hear the rattling of the tin as we watched the truant bundle leaping down, and we thought of what might be our fate, were it not for our trusty rope and axes, should we start unexpectedly down the steep slopes.
Still down went the swag, turning over on its ends and bounding over crevasses in a manner which made us quite envious. At last it hovered on a saddle. In breathless anxiety we wondered if it would stop, or whether it would take the slope to the Hochstetter ice-fall on the one hand, or the Freshfield on the other. One little effort more it appeared to make, and then away it went, careering down again towards the Freshfield ice-fall below.
Our hopes were shattered, and we were fast giving vent to expressions of despair when the career of the swag was suddenly cut short in a partially filled bergschrund, where it was brought up in some soft snow.
We dared not risk staying out for the night where we were without the lost swag, for no rocks affording any shelter were available, so determined, after making a little further progress to get a view of the plateau, to return to our bivouac at 7,400 feet—about 1,200 or 1,400 feet below our present altitude—and make a fresh attempt on the next day, weather permitting. The last man came up the rope, and we made our way up the final slopes of snow on to that great dome of glacier which we had so often gazed on from below.
Ah, what a sight burst upon our astonished eyes as we gained its summit!
It seemed the very acme of mountain glory in all the glories around us. A few hundred feet below lay that terra incognita, the Great Plateau, rounding off southwards to the Hochstetter ice-fall, bounded on the west by the giant form of Aorangi, on the north by Mount Tasman, and on the east by Mount Haast and the ridge of that mountain on which we now stood. The Linda Glacier could just be observed coming round the north-eastern arête of Aorangi, and on either side of it towered up to the heavens the two grandest mountains in New Zealand—Aorangi and Mount Tasman; the former a lowering fortress of black rock and hanging glaciers, avalanche-streaked throughout, the latter an ice-clad mass with three summits, covered thickly with hanging glaciers overlapping one another as do shingles on a housetop, looking utterly unclimbable. Only two masses of rock are visible, over which avalanches constantly swept.
The sight is certainly the grandest of its kind I have seen in the Southern Alps, and Harper tried in vain to recall its equal in Switzerland.
After working our way upwards along the ridge to the nearest rocks we deposited a note of our visit in a pannikin, and building a small cairn over it, beat a retreat.
We experienced some difficulty in getting down the top rocks, but eventually gained our footsteps in the snow, and following down the route of the truant swag, recovered it from its snowy bed some 600 feet below the point where it commenced its downward journey.
We arrived at the bivouac just before dark, and had scarcely finished brewing a warm drink when down came a nor’-wester upon us.