The air was still, the water ran;
No need was there for maid or man,
When we put up, my wife and I,
At God’s great caravanserai.”
From an Old Play—slightly altered.
From the shoulder of the Hochstetter Dome down a long valley between the giant snow peaks of the Mount Cook Range on the one hand, and the rocky buttresses of the Malte Brun and Liebig Ranges on the other, swollen at intervals by tributary ice-streams, flowing with imperceptible movement, comes the Great Tasman Glacier—a veritable mer de glace—eighteen miles in length. Some six miles from its terminal face the Ball Glacier descends from the south-eastern shoulder of Aorangi, and pours its huge slabs of broken ice and a rubble of moraine into the parent stream. At the foot of this glacier, in a hollow between the moraine of the Tasman and the long southern arête of Mount Cook, the Rev. William Spotswood Green, with Emil Boss and Ulrich Kaufmann, pitched his fifth camp on the occasion of his memorable expedition in 1882.
Thither, a somewhat young and inexperienced mountaineer, in company with his wife, wended his way a few years later. The proposed adventure caused much critical comment in the family circle and among our friends. Some said we were mad: others envied us. Those were the delightful days of pioneering, when the mountains were a sealed book to all but a few faithful worshippers, and when adventures came, freely and fully, without the seeking. There were no motor-cars to run you up in a day from the confines of civilization; there were no well-trodden tracks up the valleys; the turbulent rivers were unbridged; guides were a genus altogether unknown; and, at the end of the long day’s journey, there was no sheltering hut under which you could rest your weary limbs. You were your own guide, your own porter, your own tent-pitcher, and your own cook. They were days in which we accomplished little in the matter of real climbing; but they were days in which the blood was strong and Hope flew ahead on swift wings—days that are now gone, alas! never to return.
Previous to our visit no Englishwoman had ever attempted this journey. To a foreigner—Frau von Lendenfeld—belonged the honour of being the first woman to traverse the Great Tasman Glacier. Frau Lendenfeld, however, was a good mountaineer; and it is given to few women to do such pioneering as she did in the Southern Alps. We were mere amateurs at the game. Still, we were not to be daunted by the croakings of friends who prophesied that our bones would soon be bleaching on the glaciers. Accordingly, after a good deal of correspondence, much planning and provisioning, and considerable consulting of maps and photographs, we started on our eventful journey. After a day in the train, we found ourselves at Fairlie Creek. Next morning, having had an early breakfast, we were bowling along a good gravel road, behind four spanking greys, well driven, on our way to Mount Cook.
Lunch at Lake Tekapo on a calm summer’s day, after hours of coaching, was a delightful experience. Afterwards, with your pipe alight, you stepped out into the hotel garden, and, a few paces in front of you, lapping a rocky shore, were the beautiful turquoise-green waters of the lake, reflecting the clouds and the mountains. Here horses were changed, and we started off again on our long journey through the dreary yellow tussock wastes of the Mackenzie Plains. Lake Pukaki was our halting-place for the night. At sunset we sighted its waters. Far up the valley, rising from the Tasman Flats, towered the great mass of Mount Cook, its final peak gleaming in the sunlight, and its snows reflected in the lake at our feet—here distinctly, and yonder more faintly, as the distant waters were ruffled by a passing breeze. After some time spent in a futile endeavour to get the dust out of our clothes and our eyes and our ears, we dined on the rough fare of the country. No delicate viands here! only the oily mutton-chop, fried—think of it, ye later-day disciples of Lucullus—in grease that boasted aloud of a long acquaintanceship with the pan! And for drink you had your choice of the everlasting boiled tea with all the tannin in it, of a cloudy and somewhat sour-tasting ale, or of an indifferent whisky. I know there are Scotsmen who maintain that there may be good whisky, and better whisky, and better whisky still, though there can be no such thing as bad whisky; but such enthusiastic patriotism as this could never have extended to a back-blocks New Zealand inn in the days when we first went a-pioneering. We had one delicacy—jam. Yet, truth to tell, we were uncertain whether it was stale strawberry or mouldy gooseberry. My wife, after a microscopic examination, announced that it was raspberry made from turnips! A diligent cross-examination of the handmaiden—who, in the intervals of conversation with the coach-driver in the kitchen, fairly hurled the viands at us—elicited the statement that it was gooseberry. She was rather annoyed when doubts were expressed as to her veracity, and we mildly suggested that it might be pineapple! No, she was confident it was gooseberry. How did she know? “Sure, she saw it on the label, an’ if we didn’t belaive her we could go into the back-yard, where she had thrown the tin, and see for ourselves!”
The after-glow on Mount Cook, the glorious colouring of which was mirrored in the lake, was some atonement for the want of delicacy in the viands.