Pause to repose themselves in passing by.”
This we thought of attacking on our return, so confident were we of gaining an easy victory over Tutoko.
The snow on the plateau was so hard, and the crevasses and schrunds were so marked, that we never dreamt of putting on the rope till Kenneth, who was leading, cut a step or two up a short, steep, curving slope, and found himself on the edge of a yawning bergschrund. The mountaineering authorities define a bergschrund as a big crevasse with its upper edge higher than its lower edge. Here, however, was a schrund that, paradoxical as it may seem, had a curving lower lip that rose above its upper edge, and so it happened that as we were proceeding up the glacier we found ourselves on dangerous ground before we were aware of it. But the snow was so hard that even this thin overhanging lip would have held the whole party safely. We deemed it wise, however, at this stage, to put on the rope, and we bore away to the right to avoid other schrunds, eventually reaching the crest of the range and overlooking a pass that led down into the Holyford. Here there were some most remarkable pinnacles of rock, and the radiation of the heat from one of the larger buttresses had melted the ice of the plateau, which stood back from it in a beautiful amphitheatre some forty or fifty feet thick. This we named the Colosseum. The ice at the top was a pure white, but gradually merged into beautiful tints of bluish green lower down, where, owing to the greater pressure, it was more compact. The bold granite battlements, rising above the delicately tinted Colosseum ice, half in sunshine, half in shadow, and the broad expanse of the plateau combined to make as effective an Alpine picture as could well be imagined, and we now longed for the camera which our tired shoulders had rebelled against carrying beyond the head of the valley. Cameras were heavy in those days.
From the Colosseum to the final snow slope was but a few hundred yards, and up to this point we were well satisfied with our progress. Now, however, our troubles began. The névé was so hard that every step had to be cut with the pick end of the axe. Midway up the slope was an overhanging wall of ice, and up to this we cut steps, only to find, when too late, that we could not surmount the obstacle, so we turned abruptly to the right and made a traverse to where the wall ran out. Then we made a more difficult traverse back again, above the wall, and, ascending gradually, after a good deal of left-handed step-cutting, we gained the final rocks. These, to our dismay, we found glazed with ice. It was the penalty we paid for coming so late into these low latitudes.
At the point where we first gained the rocks, they were so steep and so glazed with ice that it was practically impossible to get on to them. There was nothing for it but to make a traverse along the slope for some distance in the hope of finding an easier place at which to attack them. Kenneth led round here, the step-cutting being arduous. Sometimes he was out of sight round a corner, and while he was chipping away, we held on with our axes and stood firmly in the steps till he called to us to move on a step or two. The ice chips went swishing down the slope over the ice wall and into a bergschrund at the top of the plateau. Occasionally we were able to hook the rope over a projecting knob of rock, but, for the most part, the rocks afforded no hold. Kenneth, however, made the steps wide and deep, and, so long as we moved one at a time, managed the rope skilfully, and kept our heads half as cool as our feet were, the danger was practically nil, for everything above was frozen, and there could be neither avalanche nor falling rock to fear. Still the situation was sufficiently exhilarating, and Hodgkins afterwards informed us that on mature reflection he had come to the conclusion that the pictures in the Badminton book on mountaineering, instead of being, as he had at one time imagined, greatly exaggerated, were wonderfully true to nature.
With this sort of work hour after hour slipped by, and still our peak looked down defiantly on us. At length, when we did get on to the rocks, progress was slower than ever, and, eventually, we had to turn back from the line of route we had selected and take to an ice-filled couloir that was both steep and slippery, with smooth slabs of rock showing through, in places, just under the ice. Up this we slowly hacked our way and gained some broken rocks above, where the climbing was still difficult. In one place the rocks were perpendicular, and, owing to the ice and the nature of the rock, the holds were few and far between. The ice had to be chipped off the rocks, and it rained down on the heads and hands of those below with rather unpleasant force, till at length we reached the highest rocks, and called a halt. The views were splendid. On the one hand was the valley of the Holyford, on the other that of the Cleddau. Inland, we looked over a wilderness of peaks rising, near at hand, in savage grandeur, and farther away mingling and fading in the dim haze of distance. But all the while
“the broad sun
Was sinking down in his tranquillity,”
and, as we had spent hours on those rocks and ice slopes where we only expected to spend minutes, it behoved us to think of the descent. There was a further pinnacle of the peak above us, and, earlier in the season, with the rocks in good condition, we should have waltzed up it in quick time. But now, with the rocks in this frozen state, it was clear that there would be step-cutting—and difficult step-cutting at that—all the way, and not only step-cutting but the uncovering of the rock itself, so that if we wished to get off the mountain in daylight, it was already high time to think about the descent. We took one last look around, and, then, very slowly, and cautiously, with our faces to the mountain, we climbed down, the last man, when opportunity offered, hitching the rope around some pinnacle, so that the others might descend more safely. We had turned none too soon, for just as we reached the foot of the rocks the sun, in a blaze of golden glory, pushed his rosy rim behind a bank of westering cloud, and all the choicest and most delicate tints from Nature’s palette seemed blended in the evening sky above the far away mountain-tops. Someone has wisely said, or written, that if you must have a sunset in your book, by all means have it, but let it be a short one; and in this case we must perforce follow such excellent advice, for we had scarce time to notice detail, though we could not help every now and then stealing a glance from our icy staircase to the glowing west beyond.
But there was no time to stop. The keen air and the gathering gloom warned us to get off those steep and slippery ice slopes before dark. But it would have been dangerous to hurry, so down we went, faces to the wall, with no sound to break the silence save the clink! clink! clink! of our axes in the ice, and an occasional admonition from Kenneth to the plucky Hodgkins to take the steps faster. But Kenneth’s legs are long and Hodgkins’s legs are short, and, as the steps had been made at intervals to suit the former, it was not so easy for the latter to comply with the request. Still we made good progress, considering the difficulties, and at length emerged from the shadow of the peak into the moonlight which now gleamed on the final slope just above the plateau. Here we had adventures. The temptation to indulge in a glissade was too strong to be resisted, so, unfastening myself from the rope, I made a traverse across the slope so as to evade the bergschrund below, and started off on a standing glissade. But the slope was steeper, and the snow harder, than I imagined, and, though I used my axe as a brake with all the skill I could, I quickly lost control, and went whirling down at an alarming speed. Away went my hat and away went my axe, but I just managed to keep my feet till, with strange gyrations of arms and legs, I landed, breathless with excitement, on the gentler slopes of the plateau, 300 or 400 feet below. The others, profiting by my experience, came down more slowly, trusting simply to the hold they obtained with their axes, for we had made no steps here in going up. All went well till Kenneth suddenly found Hodgkins whizzing past him down the slope in the direction of the bergschrund. Kenneth, however, was equal to the emergency, for, quick as thought, he clutched the slack of the rope with one hand, and dug his axe into the slope with the other, bringing his companion up with a round turn a few feet below him. Once off these slopes the strain of the past few hours was at an end, and we ran down the plateau in the moonlight to where we had left our coats in the morning. Here we hastily donned them, and then continued our race across the plateau. On the last snow slopes we had to slow down, as the gradient was steeper, and the snow was now frozen quite hard. The ice fall was a glorious sight in the clear moonlight.