Page:Du Faur - The Conquest of Mount Cook.djvu/121

Rh of round, if he could help me a bit with the rope. He agreed, and somehow I managed to haul myself up and arrived, breathless but safe, and we sat down in the first convenient spot, and concluded that we had had enough excitements for one day, and that this was the worst (or best, which ever way one looks at it) piece of rock-work I had done, and more difficult than anything we had met with on Mount Malte Brun last year. Another half-hour up an easy rock ridge and the summit was in sight. We reached it without difficulty at 2.15 p.m., and concluded we must have climbed 4,000 feet, having left the glacier three and a half hours before. We had no aneroid, so could not get the exact height of our peak, but it must be over 8,000 feet, as it was considerably above Barron's Saddle, and that is 7,654 feet. The day was perfect, with not a breath of wind. We stood and gazed around us trying to take in all the wondrous scene. Mount Sealy towered up quite close to us, looking strange and unexpectedly large from this side. The Dobson Valley stretched away beneath our feet; it is very narrow, with a silver thread of river winding through, and in the afternoon shadows looked like the hollow between two dark white-crested waves. I took a photograph of it, and it turned out for all the world like one of Dore's pictures in "Paradise Lost." The West Coast stretched away in front of us, ridge after ridge, peak after peak, to the horizon. The Muller Glacier wound like a white snake at our feet, Sefton's great white wall towering into the blue sky at its base. Farther north we could see La Perouse and St. David's Dome, and the whole length of the Hooker Glacier crowned by Mount Cook. Away eastward the Tasman and Murchison Glaciers and their respective peaks leading down to the Tasman River, whose course we could follow through yellow plains till it emptied itself into the blue of Lake Pukaki, fifty miles away.

I was indeed lucky in climbing my first virgin peak on such a day. Other peaks were ahead of me of greater