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Uncomfortably dressed up with everything just so, including tight new
shoes, listening apathetically to the conversation as it passed from the
impossibility of running the house without domestic help to the difficulty
of purchasing bottled beer and cigarettes, I felt a sudden piercing jab
like a needle through the ball of my big toe and jumped violently to life.
As some sort of explanation seemed to be expected, I said "Frostbite," and
lapsed into silence again, but, recalling the capital-letter climb on
which I sustained a slightly frostbitten big toe which still occasionally
deals me a sharp nerve jab, I felt a deep nostalgia begin to creep over me
for the wild, carefree mountaineering life — sweating up the glacier under
a 50-lb. pack; toiling up densely forested mountain slopes with mud on our
pants and water squelching through our boots, faces scorched by sun and
wind; rained on, hailed on, snowed on. whipped by blizzards on the
heights; glissading down thousands of feet of snow slope to some rough
alpine hut nestling snugly on the mountainside, or perched precariously on
a rocky outcrop in a world of white snow-fields, or dropped down among
huge tumbled boulders on a moraine. shaken by a continual thunder of
avalanches hurtling from the surrounding peaks. How far back in the misty
past it all seemed now! . . .
We had already had a fortnight of magnificent weather in the highest part
of the New Zealand Alps, and now, with only three days' holiday remaining,
we conceived the bright idea of climbing Mt. Cook (12,000 odd ft.), via
the southern peak, which is mainly a rock face and hence very enticing to
one fed from infancy on Australian rock. The only question was, would the
weather gods smile on us for a further couple of days? Ominous signs were
already creeping up the Hooker Valley the day we left for the Gardiner
Hut, situated at a height of 5,000 ft. on the lower western slope of Cook,
in a most exciting location on a huge mound of rock called "Pudding Rock."
To get to it you climb almost vertically with the aid of a wire rope,
while the wind tears round your trouser legs and a waterfall splashes on
your head from above. Merely to get as far as Gardiner Hut, let alone
Cook, calls for a spot of prime mountaineering technique.
We ensconced ourselves in the hut, what time the weather worsened — a
roaring blizzard that shook the hut to its foundations and threatened to
lift it skywards, hail that dashed on the iron roof and walls like a
spatter of bullets, and snow that swept horizontally down the Hooker
Valley in mighty swirls. "This kills our chance on Cook to-morrow," said
we as we concocted the large and customary bully-beef stew and settled
into our bunks for an afternoon's riotous reading of the hut literature,
chiefly Wild West and mystery yarns. We went to sleep early with a watch
on the table and a torch close by so we could refer to it at intervals
throughout the night, having no alarm watch, and hoped that the storm
would abate before midnight which, sure enough, it did. At 2.30 we arose
on a beautiful, calm, starry night, heated up our rice and apricots, had
breakfast while we pushed our feet into our boots, and before 4 a.m. we
were away.
The previous week Birtle had climbed Cook from the Tasman side. On the
descent his companion had had the misfortune to drop his ice axe, which
caused them to spend the night out on the summit rocks and made the
subsequent descent very nerve-racking. With this salutary lesson in mind I
put a double thong on my ice axe before setting out. "No chance of my
repeating old Bob's bad luck," thought I, but just to be doubly sure I
included in my pack as a second line of defence a large pig-stabber knife.
Several hours up steep, deeply crevassed snowfields brought us to the rock
face of which the South Peak of Cook is mainly composed, and from then on
there were hours and hours and still more hours of upward progression,
clearing the plastered snow and chipping ice off every single foothold and
handhold as we went.
About three-quarters of the way up, while endeavouring to get a better
grip on the rope, I relinquished my hold on the ice axe, relying on the
double thong round my wrist to hold it dangling till I should need it, but
the treacherous thing contrived to fall head first, and— neatly slipping
its moorings—sailed away into bottomless space. After a few minutes' lurid
language, "Well, let the damn thing go!" said I, "I do better without it
dangling in my way," and from then on I relied on the pig-stabber knife
which, although it bent like putty and cut through the snow like a warm
knife through butter, proved effective enough and had this added advantage
that it could be held between my teeth when I needed both hands for
climbing.
Continual step-cutting had jarred our only watch into silence, so we
guessed the time by the sun. Some time after it had passed from the
mid-sky we reached the summit ice-cap. The first couple of curves of ice
were negotiated all right in crampons. The final slope of a few hundred
feet to the actual summit didn't seem worth the risk with only one ice
axe, but as it was equivalent, say, to climbing Mt. Cloudmaker, but
omitting to surmount the cairn on top, we considered we had done what we
set out to do and were content to leave it at that.
The view from that height was magnificent, embracing all the west coast
bush country to the sea stretching very blue and soft to the far horizon,
while to north and south and east lay range after range of snowy peaks and
glaciers and misty valleys. We took some photos but didn't linger too long
as the atmosphere at 12,000 ft. is somewhat chilly.
We set off on the descent, quite confident of being off the rock face by
dark, and so down the snow slopes and glacier by moonlight, arriving at
the hut certainly no later than 10 p.m. So much for our hopes! We were
still toiling slowly down the rock when the sun broke in on our
concentration with, "Well, good-night, folks."
"Eh, wait on!" cried we in some alarm, clinging on the rock face by one
clinker and a couple of fingernails.
"Sorry," says the Sun, "whistle's gone; we don't get paid for overtime,"
and with that he winked his eye and dropped down behind the mountain top.
"So ho," thought I, "another night out like the one we spent on Malte Brun
at Easter." and, hastily taking a few bearings in the last remaining
gleams of twilight, we continued our downward climb. Hours slipped by as
swiftly and noiselessly as a stream on the glacier ice, and now the moon
was with us, suffusing the rocks with its full white light.
At length we reached a ledge a few degrees nearer the horizontal than the
vertical, and here we huddled close under a projecting rock in a
vain endeavour to escape the wind while we held on and ate a handful of
sultana and some cheese.
"How-are-y'r-feelin', son?" I asked, articulating with difficulty as my
face and lips were frozen stiff as a board.
"Pretty grisly," says Birtle, still not
•without his infectious grin. "And you?"
"Cold as blazes," I replied. "Let's get going before we freeze to death" —
which we thereupon did with as much speed as our stiffening frames would
allow.
There •was a bit of delay while we
deliberated which of two rather similar glaciers was our one. and — thanks
to our guardian angels exerting a little more than their customary
solicitude on our behalf — we managed to choose the right one. An hour or
so of cramponing down remarkably steep snow slopes, my hand on Birtle's
shoulder in lieu of my lost ice axe, brought us to the badly crevassed
area, and right in the thick of a maze of deep cracks the moon,
with even less warning than the sun had given us, whispered, "Time's up,"
and softly withdrew.
"O well," we thought, "we got on all right without the sun, now we'll get
on all right without the moon" — and that was just how it was.
Dream-walking down the final slopes of the glacier, yawning like a tornado
every twenty paces ... a sleepy voice enquires, "Do you see what I see?"
"It's the dawn?" Yes, .it's the dawn right enough.
"I don't think that's funny," said an aggrieved voice addressing the sun,
still bearing a grudge against him for the practical joke played on us
yester eve. This sunlight-moonlight-no light-sunlight sequence played
strange tricks with one's sanity. "Life is a chequer-board of nights and
days ... Of nights and days ... of nights and days . . ."
"Are those rocks our rocks?" asked Birtle, in that strange possessive
attitude one tends to adopt in the mountains towards any familiar bit of
scenery. With difficulty I forced my heavy eyes open another fraction of
an inch and surveyed the dim, rugged outline of rock outcrop.
"They'll do," I murmured, "one heap of rocks is as good as another I
suppose."
"It's not the rocks we want," Birtle reminded me gently. "It's the hut wot
stands thereon."
"Eh?" I said . . . but I was asleep again; meanwhile my legs carried on
mechanically towards the rock as steel is attracted to a magnet, or — a
better simile as regards speed — as a slug is attracted to a lettuce.
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