AORANGI: THE HIGHEST PEAK
[From a Water-colour Sketch
It was half-past five. Four hours and a half we had been toiling from the head of the Linda Glacier, thirteen hours and a half from our bivouac, without any halt to speak of. A wind began to blow from the north-west, adding fresh cause for anxiety about the descent. One thing was certain—if we wanted to get down alive we should have to reach the Linda Glacier again before dark.
We worked as hard as we were able at step-cutting for another fifteen minutes, but only made slow progress; yet there was the cornice, just away to the right, the crest of the ridge to the left, and the top scarcely a stone’s throw above, with no difficulty in the way. What would we not have given for another hour of daylight? How could we turn away when so near to a complete victory over our old foe?
Dixon again suggested turning, and I could not do otherwise than defer to his advice, for already we were caught in a trap, and should bad weather come upon us—and the wind and cold were fast increasing—before we reached the Linda Glacier again the probabilities were that we never should have returned from the giddy heights of the great Aorangi, the ‘Sky-piercer.’
The height of the mountain is 12,349 feet; our aneroid read at our turning-point 12,300, and we reckoned the summit to be 140 feet above us. The slight error in the reading of the instrument would be accounted for by the impending change of weather.
The view is magnificently comprehensive. Looking northwards we could see clear over the top of our giant neighbour, Mount Tasman (11,475 feet). On the western side, the ocean, but twenty miles distant, was covered by a mantle of low-lying clouds creeping into the bays and inlets of the coast, studded here and there with islanded hill-tops, and stretching away to what seemed a limitless horizon on the west. A streak of blue ocean showed through the cloud mantle near Hokitika, seventy miles northwards.
North-eastwards the glorious array of the Southern Alps extended, presenting a panorama of such magnificence and comprehensiveness that it defies any attempt at description. It is one of those vast pictures which are indelibly impressed upon the memory—one of those overpowering examples of Nature’s sublimity which seem to move a man’s very soul and call him to a sense of his own littleness.
Close under us lay the scenes of all our joys and sorrows of the past five years: the Tasman Glacier, encircled by those splendid peaks and snow-fields whose forms we had learned to know and love so well; further afield lay the Liebig Range, and, showing over this, Mount Jukes and his attendant satellites of rocky peaks. Beyond this again, far, far away in the blue and indefinite east, we could distinguish the hills of Banks Peninsula, close to our homes near Christchurch, whilst we could imagine that the blue haze distinguishable there was indeed the eastern ocean, 120 miles distant.