CHAPTER IX
DOWN IN THE VALLEYS
“I know a vale where I would go one day,
Where snows gleam bright above the vast moraine,
A mighty cleft in the great bosoming hills,
A great grey gateway to the mountains’ heart.”
After Bliss Carman.
A book on climbing may be supposed to deal mainly with peaks, passes, and glaciers; and perhaps, in these days of the rock experts, one should add, precipices. It is supposed to be, very largely, a matter of “victories of ascent, and looking down on all that has looked down on us.” And in that phase of it, no doubt, lies the great joy of climbing. Yet the days of defeat are not altogether to be despised. For one thing they have a chastening influence upon the soul of the perhaps, over-ambitious mountaineer. Beside his winter fire, too, when he sees the great valleys and the high peaks taking form, once more, in the smoke-wreaths of his evening pipe, the days spent in the valleys—days when he never climbed at all—will mean for him a flood of precious memories that he will have no desire to stay. This perhaps applies with greater force to the climber in a new country, for he cannot—like his brother in the older lands—take his ease along the level road, nor, in a moment of temporary mental aberration, be tempted by a mountain railway! For myself I have got great enjoyment in those days, when, “having loitered in the vale too long,” I have “gazed, a belated worshipper,” and even out of days when “the rain-clouds hung low on the mountains with their burden of unshed showers.” Such days give one time to indulge in a little quiet philosophy—to study his brother humans under the lens of adversity; to see his own mind through the rays of introspection; and, perchance, to concern himself with the minor matters of birds and beetles, butterflies and flowers. I may therefore be pardoned by the general reader—if not by the mountaineer—if, in writing this chapter, I climb no higher than a mountain hut or a low bivouac.
One sunny December day, when I was rather tired of work, and thinking of some sort of holiday, a letter arrived from my friend and former climbing companion Dr. Norman Cox. He asked me to join him in an expedition to the Mount Cook district. There were several obstacles in the way of my going. But the talk of mountaineering is as the whiff of battle in the nostrils of an old war-horse, and when once the conquering of virgin peaks and the making of new passes into unexplored country begins to loom on the climber’s horizon, not all the gold in Golconda will keep him back. Therefore the difficulties were brushed aside, and one fine day my friend, my wife, and I found ourselves with ice-axes, tent, sleeping bags, Alpine rope, and provisions, on board the Mount Cook coach, bound once more for that goal of New Zealand climbers, the Hermitage. We were to be joined there by Mr. T. C. Fyfe and, later on, by Mr. W. J. P. Hodgkins, who, like Fyfe, had climbed with us on other expeditions.