Once off the snow, it was not an easy matter to keep to our route, and, lower down, in the shadow of the valley, the difficulty was increased. All things considered, however, we managed to hit off the route wonderfully well; but, at last, in the darkness, we were completely stuck up at a point not more than 2000 feet above our camp. There was only one way by which we could descend, but all our efforts to find the exact spot were unavailing. I tried to the right in several places, making an awkward traverse across a steep and slippery wall of granite, and, eventually, on finding myself hanging over the face of an awesome precipice above the glacier, I gave up the search. On rejoining my companions we held a short council of war, with the result that, rather than risk an accident, we decided to stand the night out on the mountain. There was no shelter where we were, nor any dry grass nor fern with which to make a comfortable bivouac, but, luckily, the night was fine. The temperature fell quickly, and the provoking part of the situation was that, only some 2000 feet below, we could see the glimmer of our camp fire—so near and yet so far. We shouted and jodelled to our guide in hopes that he would hear us, come up to the foot of the cliff, and give us a clue to the route; but all our shouting and jodelling were in vain. The only answer was the rumble of an avalanche from the séracs opposite, and visions of the soft bed and the hot supper that we had been longing for quickly faded away. We were none too warmly clad, and we had but a limited stock of provisions—three small scones and the scrapings of a tin of jam, which we now disposed of, washing the crumbs down with a drink of icy cold water from a little pool in a rock close at hand.
The temperature continued to fall till by ten o’clock it was several degrees below freezing-point, and the pool of water on the rock became a frozen mass. We selected a spot where there was a comparatively flat rock about a dozen yards long, on which we might promenade at intervals to keep up the circulation. The stars shone in a wonderfully clear sky, star beyond star, until they seemed to melt or mingle into a pale glow in the realms of illimitable space.
“No one,” says Stevenson, “knows the stars who has not slept, as the French say, à la belle étoile. He may know all their names and distances and magnitudes, and yet be ignorant of what alone concerns mankind—their serene and gladsome influence on the mind.” There is a great deal of truth, though not, perhaps, the whole truth in this bit of Stevensonian philosophy. But, at any rate, it is in such bivouacs as these that one realizes to the full the wondrous beauty of the Southern constellations: not of the Southern Cross itself—which, one might almost say, is a feeble thing as compared with the regal radiance of those seven resplendent suns of The Great Bear that have scarce changed their positions since the days of Ptolemy, two thousand years ago—but of the Southern firmament as a whole. I have heard English-men profess their disappointment with their first view of the Cross and its attendant constellations; but let them sail to the far South, or camp, in late autumn, in the high mountains, or even go out on one of our clearer winter nights, and they will begin to understand our pæan. One can easily comprehend their first disappointment, for, in the same way was I, too, disappointed, when, sailing through tropic seas, I first saw The Bear, and, also, later, in England. But soon it began to dawn upon me that neither the haze of smoky London nor the moist summer air of southern England was the medium through which one should search for the beauty of the heavens; and, finally, one clear, dark night, in the Isle of Arran, I began to form a higher estimate of the beauty and magnitude of the Northern constellations—an estimate that was more than justified, when, later in the year, after witnessing the most gorgeous sunset imaginable from the summit of a pass in the High Carpathians, I descended into the darksome valley, and saw The Great Bear, in all his glory, with his two pointers leading the eye on to the Pole Star, serene and immovable in his place in the Northern sky. Nevertheless, I must still hold that our Southern firmament bears the palm, and more especially that part of the Milky Way—invisible in the North—that is strewn with millions of bright stars, and that glows with the nebulous mingled haze of still more distant myriad suns.
One begins then to realize that
“To other worlds that spin in space
Our world looks just a shining star.”
But, perhaps, I shall be told that one whose ignorance of astronomy is in inverse ratio to his knowledge of mountains cannot be trusted to make comparisons; and I quite agree that it is as futile to attempt comparisons between groups of stars as between groups of mountains, for each has a beauty and a grandeur that cannot be justly estimated the one against the other. And, moreover, no author, however obscure, can afford to have a charge of parochialism levelled at his head in regard to the firmament, though, mind you, there are people quite ready to take up this attitude, as I myself know, for I once heard a young lady clinch an argument with an acquaintance, about the relative beauties of their cities, with this triumphant assertion, tacked on to an admission—“Well, your harbour may be beautiful; but, you should see the moon we have in Auckland!”
But I have been drawn, by this dissertation on the stars, from the matter in hand. We certainly had full opportunity of studying the beauty of the Southern stars that night. A cold wind began to sigh through the rocks, and it was not long before we commenced to tramp resolutely up and down our rocky platform, marking time to a song sung, or a tune whistled. This got somewhat monotonous after about half an hour, and, for a change, we lay down in the lee of some detached rocks near our platform and tried to sleep. But granite rock is not exactly a feather mattress, and the Milky Way makes rather a cool counterpane, so it was not long before we had resumed our platform march. Then we coiled up once more in the shelter of the rocks. At first it was “one man one rock,” but experience, which teaches many things, subsequently taught us that “three men one rock” resulted in a greater conservation of bodily warmth, albeit the outside man got somewhat the worst of the bargain, and was always the first to resume the march. However, we were sufficiently magnanimous to take turn about on the outside, and in this way we did fairly well, and some of us even managed to sleep. We spent the night in half-hours under the rock trying to sleep, and half-hours perambulating the narrow platform, singing songs, telling stories, making speeches, and trying to get warm again. But the hours passed so slowly that after a time we were afraid to look at our watches. For once we thought an autumn night unnecessarily long; and, truth to tell, we would willingly have exchanged all the glories of the Southern Cross for a hot supper, our warm sleeping bags, and a glowing camp fire. I tried to console myself with the fact that this cold, autumn bivouac was better than our midsummer one on Aorangi on that terrible night when the snow, drifting higher and higher every hour, threatened to overwhelm us, when the lightning played around us, and the incessant thunder shook the tottering ridge. We had endured all that with a Mark Tapleyan philosophy and some pretence of jollity, so that now, when the elements were propitious, we were not so much inclined to grumble, but rather cheered ourselves with the thought that when morning dawned one should have gained a new experience. And so we talked and joked and sang; and had anyone chanced that way an hour after midnight he would have been amused, and mayhap astonished, to see three yawning and shivering mountaineers, with hands deep in pockets and hats tied down over ears, solemnly marking time on the rock to the strains of a weird melody from Kenneth’s répertoire.
But notwithstanding all our inventions the night seemed long. Some kola wine which we doled out at intervals in small doses kept away hunger and, we imagined, had a sustaining effect. And, somehow, the hours did pass. The stars began to lose their lustre and fade slowly away, till only one dim twinkling orb was left—
“And east and west, without a breath,