Page:Aurora Australis.djvu/55

THE ASCENT OF MOUNT EREBUS. they bumped and bounded over the wavy ridges of the névé slope. Brocklehurst’s load, consisting largely of all our cooking utensils, done up in a large bag, if not the most erratic, was certainly the noisiest, and recalled, on a small scale, Kipling’s Bolivar, ‘clanging like a smithy shop after every roll’. The battered remains of the aluminium vessels fetched up with a final big bang against the rocks below. Mackay now led the glissade, and firmly grasping his ice-axe, slid to the bottom in less than a minute; we all followed suit.

As we gathered speed on our downward course, and the chisel edge of the ice-axe bit deeper into the hard névé, it sprayed our faces and necks with a miniature shower of ice. The temperature was low, and whenever the steel of the ice-axe touched one’s bare skin, it seemed to burn it like a hot iron. We all reached the bottom of the slope safely, and fired with the success of our first glissade, and finding an almost endless succession of snow slopes below us, we let ourselves go again and again, in a series of wild rushes towards the foot of the main cone. Here and there we bumped heavily against the opposing edges of hard ‘sastrugi’, or tore our nether garments on projecting points of sharp rock. Unfortunately it was not only clothes and cookers which suffered in our wild career: