When we had gained a height of 9000 feet, the cold north-wester, at this altitude blowing with considerable violence, struck us with full force, and whisked clouds of snow and fine particles of ice in our faces. The mist was also pouring over the main divide, and the Longton party, who were watching us from their distant sheltered ridge, now saw us disappearing into the clouds. Really, we should have turned at this point, but Turner was very anxious to climb a virgin peak, and, while he led up the frozen slope, we two followed meekly in his uncertain wake. Soon the clouds and the driving snow grew so dense that we could see only a very few yards ahead, and the line of route became quite obscured. The wind also increased in violence, and once or twice we had to cling to the frozen slope with the aid of our ice-axes. The wind was bitterly cold, and icicles hung from Turner’s moustache and half-grown beard. For about an hour we climbed upward in this blizzard, without any likelihood of a view, and with a very good chance of not being able to follow the proper route on the descent. Besides, we could not tell what dangers lay ahead, so at last Turner gave the word to retreat. During a momentary rent in the driving cloud, we got a glimpse of the last bergschrund, which runs round the final ice-cap of the mountain, so that we were only some four hundred feet below the summit, and all the real difficulties of the climb had been overcome. Another half an hour in fine weather, and we should have topped our peak; but a first ascent cannot be claimed till the actual summit is under foot—at all events by any true sportsman—and therefore, though only a few hundred feet of easy step-cutting on the final ice-cap remained to be done, we retired defeated.
As we turned, the swirling cloud and snow became denser, and I was fearful lest we should not find our way back. All I could see was my two shivering companions and the Alpine rope that connected the party. As it was, the drifting snow had completely obliterated our upward steps, and we got off the proper line; but we climbed downward as quickly as possible, trusting to the general direction of the slopes to bring us right in the end. There was not, however, a great deal of room to come and go on, and the great walls and blocks of broken ice loomed through the fog, looking nearly twice their actual size, and more formidable than ever. At length Fyfe found a landmark in the sloping sérac round which we had climbed on the ascent, and, thereafter, we were able to keep the route fairly well. Just below this sérac Turner started a glissade, but the slope—hard rough ice under a very thin coating of snow—was unsuitable for glissading, and, after whizzing down a few feet, I had the misfortune to strike a hard block in the ice, and was doubled up in an instant with a bruise on my left hip, another on my right knee, and a third on the bone just above the right ankle. Using my ice-axe as a brake, I shouted to the leader, and quickly pulled up; but not till Fyfe, who was glissading behind, had almost cannoned on to me. After this experience, we proceeded more cautiously till we had passed the dangerous corner at the foot of Walter Peak, where the fog thinned out, and we could see more clearly. The rest was a trudge down the glacier to the hut. Turner proudly carried the icicles on his moustache right into the hut. We had been going steadily for nine hours without halting to eat or drink, and we were glad of hot soup and other luxuries that Graham provided out of the Government locker.
All the others, including two tourists who had come up with Clark, returned to the Ball Hut that afternoon; but we remained behind to make another attempt to conquer Elie de Beaumont. Next day the weather was still threatening; but we marched off again, only to turn after proceeding a little way up the glacier. We resolved to try once more on the morrow, and started by lantern light, this time at 2 a.m. The night had been unusually warm, and Fyfe and I felt convinced that it was useless to persevere, as the snow would be in bad order, and there was a nor’-wester brewing. In deference to Turner’s wishes, however, we went on; but we never touched our mountain that day. The snow was soft and slushy, and, after a weary, uninteresting trudge, we reached a point above the Lendenfeld Saddle—8000 feet above sea-level. The nor’-wester had covered the West Coast with cloud; but Fyfe and I were glad of the opportunity of looking down the pass we made from the head of the Great Tasman Glacier to the West Coast six years before. Many memories of that somewhat daring exploit were recalled, and, as we looked over the steep walls of splintered rock and broken ice, we now wondered how we had got down.
In an icy-cold wind we trudged wearily back through the soft snow to the Malte Brun Hut. The weather was bad as ever, so, after some food and a rest, we retreated down the glacier to the Ball Hut. Fyfe had a skinned heel, Turner had sore feet, and I had a bad ankle. Again we had suffered defeat: Elie de Beaumont hid his snowy summit in the clouds, defiant and unconquered, and the ascent of Mount Cook seemed still afar off.
On our arrival at the Ball Glacier Hut we found it already occupied by a party consisting of Professor Baldwin Spencer of Melbourne, Mr. and Mrs. Lindon of Geelong Grammar School, and Mr. L. Stott, junior, of Melbourne. Clark had come up with them, as had also the coach-driver and the stableman, so that the hut was again full to overflowing, with the result that three men had to sleep in the ladies’ room, while Clark and Fyfe dossed on the floor of the men’s room, in which all the bunks were already occupied. So far as we were concerned, it was evident that our party would be the better for a rest; but even had we been bent upon another climb, the weather would again have prevented it.
That night the nor’-wester developed in force, and, accompanied by heavy rain, howled round the hut. Turner and Fyfe, the coach-driver and the stableman, returned to the Hermitage, but I was unable to accompany them, and remained behind to treat my now swollen ankle with hot fomentations and bandaging. Nevertheless, I spent a very pleasant day in the company of the Professor, Mr. and Mrs. Lindon, Mr. Stott, and Clark. Our expedition was evidently, for various reasons, becoming an ill-starred one, and the congenial company of my new-found friends came like a ray of sunshine through the gloom.
In the afternoon the weather cleared, and, as it was New Year’s Day, we celebrated the event with a four-course dinner, served up in Clark’s best style. The menu consisted of soup, fried sardines, cold mutton, and hot plum pudding, with cocoa (decidedly good) à la Baldwin Spencer. The best of the Professor was that you would never know he was a professor, and it was some time before it dawned upon me that he might be, and indeed was, the man who had been guilty of an erudite treatise on a rudimentary eye in the tuatara lizard, and the author of a valuable work on the Australian aboriginals! Evidently I was in luck’s way—he might have been just an ordinary tourist, or a climber who regarded the mountains very much in the nature of greased poles, to be climbed for his own glorification and profit. On the contrary, the new visitors were charmed with the New Zealand Alps, and it was a great delight to Clark and myself to find such a whole-souled appreciation of our mountain glories, and no attempt at belittlement or vain comparison.
That evening there was a wonderful sunset, and we all stood outside the hut watching the gorgeous and ever-changing pageantry of cloud-land. In front of De la Bêche—most beautiful of mountains—and the spotless snows of the Minarets, far up the ice-filled valley, great rounded cumuli came sailing across from the north-west, like huge balls of glowing fire. The southern sky was glorious with higher clouds of spun gold and burnished copper, and the heavens themselves were tinted with yellow and amber, in the distance exquisitely shaded by some master-hand into delicate ethereal greens and blues. The ever-changing tints formed marvellous and wonderful harmonies. The stony grey wall of the moraine fronting the hut was splashed with the sombre green of the Alpine herbage, and across the glacier, high above the level of the moraine, the rugged rock peaks of the Malte Brun Range were tinged with dull rose, their bold perpendicular slabs silhouetted against a sky of lapis lazuli flecked with exquisite wisps of thin cloud. The colours changed quickly; the clouds, sailing past De la Bêche in the dying nor’-wester, lost their fire; the spun gold, the lapis lazuli, and the delicate peacock blues and greens gave place to sombre grey. The air grew chilly, so we went into the hut, and chatted around the fire till bedtime. Thus passed our New Year’s Day.
On the 2nd January my friends departed for the Malte Brun Hut, eight miles up the glacier, and I was left alone. Even the keas and the two sea-gulls, who had interested and amused us during the previous day, had gone upon a winged pilgrimage. I did some washing and mending, cooked my meals, washed the dishes, tidied the hut, wrote up my journal, made a beetle trap with an empty tin sunk in the ground, fed the carrier pigeon left by Clark, and read Rider Haggard’s Jess, which I found in the hut, for the second time. The weather grew worse, and in the afternoon snow fell in big flakes.
On the 3rd January the programme was much the same. This day I continued the hot fomentations on my ankle, and succeeded in reducing the swelling considerably. I had no watch, so I gauged the time by my hunger, and determined to satisfy the inner man with some of the delicacies in the Government larder. “Hare soup” rather appealed to one, and a tin was opened, only to find that it contained stewed kidneys! I pitched it over the hut and opened a tin labelled “Curried mutton chops”; but once more the label was a lie, and there stood revealed stewed kidneys. That tin with its contents also went over the roof of the hut, as did a third delicacy that existed only in the imagination of the packer. I was going through the same trial that my wife and I had gone through at the De la Bêche Bivouac several years before, and found, afterwards, that my experience was not at all an unusual one. Finally I made a dish of hot macaroni soup (put up by another firm), to which I added green peas tinned in Paris, and this, with bread, made a sumptuous repast. The weather was still unsettled, the barometer standing at 27·14, and the thermometer at 46 degrees.