A climber in New Zealand

by Malcolm Ross

Slow-dropping veils of thinnest lawn, did go;

And some thro’ wavering lights and shadows broke,

Rolling a slumbrous sheet of foam below.”

Tennyson.

In that far corner of New Zealand where the long fingers of the fiords reach inland towards the mountain ranges, amidst which lie the great deep lakes, there is a region rich in its surpassing beauty and ever ready to offer a store of stern adventure to the modest climber who delights in the untrodden ways. It is true the mountains are not high—as heights go in these modern days—yet even the Abruzzis and the Bullock-Workmans, your Conways and your Collies would, in the times I write of, find tasks to test their endurance—or, at least, their perseverance—and to put a strain upon their commissariat sufficient to conduce to a gradual tightening of the belts of such as wear them. Into that land of beautiful forests and a strange bird-life, of deep canyons and high waterfalls, of lovely lakes and clear rivers, of dark precipices and unsullied glaciers, we were the first climbers to adventure. Of our journeyings in that wonderland memories come crowding in upon me as I take up my pen to commence this chapter. But there is scarce space in this book to tell a tithe of them. They began with that sad mission into the mountains—in company with my friend and fellow-explorer, the Hon. Thos. Mackenzie—to look for my own lost professor. He had wandered out from the tent and his two companions, one wet day, for a stroll up the gorge leading to the pass they were looking for. That was more than twenty years ago, and to this day no one has found trace of him, and no man knows the manner of his death. Of how, after a hurried journey by means of special trains and coaches, we reached that beautiful, sombre “lake of the sorrowing heart,” and launched a leaky boat upon its troubled waters, only to find it sinking so rapidly that we had scarce time to get it back with our wetted belongings to the shore; of how we patched it up with old rags and some tar found mixed up with the pebbles of the beach; of our adventurous trip, with the bailer ever at work, up the lake; of our journey through the forest primeval; of our discovery of the pass and our unavailing search there; of how the mountain torrent rose in the nighttime, many feet, till the tent was in danger of being swept away; and of how our food gradually diminished until there remained only some biscuit crumbs and the leg of a tough and hoary pre-adamantine kakapo—of these and other matters I am tempted to write; but the most good-natured of publishers must put some limit to the size of the book he is producing, and so I forbear.

The cairn that we erected to the memory of Professor J. Mainwaring Brown—a talented English gentleman—with the rude wooden cross at its head, was, perhaps, not a very lasting memorial; but we took the liberty of naming after him a lonely mountain tarn and a peak at the head of the pass near which must lie his lonely grave—either in the fairyland forest or amongst the beautiful Alpine flora that he loved so well. These form a more fitting monument.

The road to this region led past the Takitimo mountain range, across the silvery tussock downs, and through unbridged streams. The Takitimo Range—so tradition says—is one of the canoes of the Maori migration turned into stone, and its sail is now the plain through which the Five Rivers flow from the inner land. Time was when the swarthy southern Maori, encamped by the lake-side, grubbed the edible fern root, or—in the absence of a war—cunningly baited his eel-pots in view of a change from the monotony of a vegetable diet. In time of war the change was, perhaps, as easily made, and, certainly, it was more decided. For some years it was thought that a remnant of the Ngatimamoes might still exist in the mountain fastnesses of Fiordland, but there can be no doubt, now, that the marauding warriors from the north practically annihilated the tribe, and that the eel-pots and fire-sticks, the old skull with the teeth gnarled from chewing the fern root, and the meres and other relics from the ancient battle-grounds, dug up by the early settlers, are all that remain, besides tradition, to tell the story of the former inhabitants of Manapouri and Te Anau.

How the lakes came to be formed is a matter for the geologists, the geographers, and the physiographers. Some will tell you they have been scooped out by the glaciers of a past period; others, again, will deny this. For myself I can never quite follow the reasoning of the erosionists. The greater glaciers, in the higher part of the range at Mount Cook, moving at the rate of, say, half an inch a day along their softer beds, and with a great press of moraine above and in the ice below, have scooped out no such deep lakes. The vanished glaciers of Te Anau and Manapouri, flowing from a lower altitude, and down a more level valley, would march at a still slower rate, and they carried with them a minimum of moraine. Why in the less likely case have we deep lakes, and, in the more likely one, none—except those shallow ones that have been formed, not by erosion, but by the blocking of the valleys with morainic débris? It is difficult to conceive how Lake Wakatipu, especially, with its surface 1000 feet above sea-level and its floor 400 feet below it, could have been so scooped out, and one is tempted to tell the erosionists, as Ruskin told them, to try to saw a piece of marble through (with edge of iron, not of soppy ice, for saw, and with sharp flint sand for felspar slime), to move the saw at the rate of an inch in three-quarters of an hour, and see what lively and impressive work they will make of it! I may be told that Ruskin was not a scientist, and I certainly am not; but even the scientists, themselves, hold converse theories—and, after all, they are only theories.

In the days when I made the journey I am now about to write of, travel in Kiwi Land was beset with many difficulties. The getting to the lake was bad enough; but once aboard the lugger—which was a very small steamer that raised steam in a most erratic way from burning wood—one never quite knew what would happen. The captain had some knowledge of steering a plough on dry land, but little in regard to the navigation of a ship, and, moreover, he had contracted an unpleasant habit of falling asleep at the wheel—a habit that one would rather not see unduly encouraged, especially on a dark night. The result was that when he awoke—or was awakened—there would generally be a heated argument between him and the one and only engineer as to where they were! The engineer had a happy knack of poking his head up through the little hatchway at an opportune moment and asking the skipper in a gruff voice where the devil he was making for; and the skipper, guiltily endeavouring to rub the slumber out of his eyes, would remark in dubious tones that he was steering for “yon clump o’ trees” or for “the promontory with the blue-gums on it”; but, as often as not, the clump of trees would be quite a fiction, and the promontory with the blue-gums on it the creation of an imaginative but otherwise dull brain. At such moments the skipper would at first argue the point with all the positiveness of the slumberer who swears he has been awake all the time; but, generally, it would end in his taking his orders from the engineer! This was somewhat disconcerting for the passengers, and, it might have been thought, humiliating for the captain, especially as he was not only the captain, but also the owner of the vessel. The captain, however, did not seem to mind. Occasionally, when there was a head wind, the little vessel would make but slow progress up the lake, and the supply of fuel would come suddenly to an end; but that was a matter easily remedied, for they simply ran the nose of the vessel ashore, and captain and engineer, with the passengers assisting, plied the axe in the forest primeval until a new supply of fuel had been put on board. Then the vessel would be put ahead for all she was worth and sparks would come streaming aft from the funnel till the drier part of the fuel on deck would catch fire and we would have to dip buckets of water from the lake to quench the conflagration, or maybe, under the press of steam caused by some combined momentary enthusiasm on the part of the engineer and the captain, the boiler tubes would commence to leak, so that we would once more have to run ashore and make up some puddle of thick clay with which to heal up the wounds—

“All nautical pride we laid aside