To do honour to our feast, the ladies had “dressed” for dinner, and their gay dressing-gowns over their ordinary costumes looked quite festive in the light of all the candles we could muster. Meanwhile we played whist and various other games. We even descended to poker. But, whatever he may be able to do in London or New York, man cannot live by cards alone on the Great Tasman Glacier, and there came a time when we craved for something more satisfying. It was half-past ten, however, before Fyfe, after a momentary dash into the darkness and the driving rain, returned to inform us “it” felt soft. There was only one “it” in our minds at that hour. Many hands made light work, and, very soon, the steaming leg of mutton, in a tin plate much too small for its ample proportions, was being carved with a very blunt knife and handed round.
And how we enjoyed that supper! Had anyone told those girls a week or two before that they would dispose of two helpings of boiled mutton off cold tin plates at half-past ten o’clock at night, he would have been laughed to scorn. But we all agreed that it was the very nicest mutton we had ever tasted, and after our living so long on tinned meats it was good. I am afraid we did not take time—as we should have done—to say a grace before that meal; for, as Charles Lamb has well said, the plainest diet seems the fittest to be preceded by a grace. I once attended one of the old London Companies’ annual dinners, at which we had turtle soups, and fine fishes, and game, and wines old and of rare vintage; and an archbishop said a grace before meat and a singer sang a grace after meat; but the taste of these choice viands has long since been forgotten, while the flavour of our simple mutton supper does not fade, but rather is intensified with the passing years. And the latter was, surely, the more worthy of the graces than the former.
After supper we played poker in the most reckless way for matches, and the ladies, novices in the game, lost and won in the most charmingly irresponsible way.
And then—after midnight—it suddenly occurred to us that we ought to go to bed. Loath to depart, we lingered until there was no excuse to stay longer. I fancy we all felt sorry to write “Finis” to such a happy day. But at last the lights were out, and in spite of the mutton, all slept soundly till morning, when the young bloods of the kea household came home with the milk, as was their wont, and roused us from our peaceful slumbers.
CHAPTER XII
DE LA BÊCHE AND THE MINARETS
“The mountains in their overwhelming might
Moved me to sadness when I saw them first,
And afterwards they moved me to delight.”