Page:Du Faur - The Conquest of Mount Cook.djvu/195

Rh the buttress, and so on to the Stuart Glacier and down to the ridge we had ascended by in the morning. We found the Hooker hut in the possession of some members of the Medical Congress, which had lately been held at Timaru. That night the wind howled round the hut, and next morning, after a fruitless attempt to gain the Copland Pass, and see if there were any signs of our friends on Mount Cook, we returned to the Hermitage, very much pleased with our first climb for 1912.

Mr. Chambers came back in the evening with his Mount Cook honours thick upon him. His attitude to the climb amused me somewhat; it seemed to be mainly thankfulness that it was over. So far as I could discover the doing of it, instead of being a pleasure, had been merely a monotonous grind. Mr. Wright, who had also made the ascent for the first time, had suffered considerably from mountain sickness, so it was hardly to be wondered at if his enthusiasm was slightly dimmed. For the hundredth time I was up against the problem as to why men who were not merely seeking notoriety should climb at all, when they apparently enjoyed the doing of it so little. If one is nervous, or bored, or tired to death by mountaineering, why do it? And if one isn't any or all three of these things, why not enjoy it? I have still to meet the enthusiastic New Zealand mountaineer who counts all discomforts but a minor part of a very joyous game. I may have been unlucky, but I have never met any one, apart from my own guides, who has been as keen and enthusiastic as myself.

As Mr. Wright had to leave the Hermitage shortly, and was now finished with Murphy, who had been acting as his private guide (he left the Government service at the end of the 1911 season), I engaged him for a few days until Alex Graham came over from the coast.

Mr. Chambers asked me to join him and Clark for a last climb, as he was leaving at the end of the week.