Page:Du Faur - The Conquest of Mount Cook.djvu/253

Rh immediately beneath the western ridge leading to the third, or lowest, peak of Mount Cook. While I endeavoured to shade my head beneath a projecting boulder from the all-too-burning rays of the sun and the reflected glare of the surrounding snow slopes, the guides set to work to clear a space on which to pitch the tent. The only suitable place dropped steeply away on its north-west side to the glacier beneath; here they built a protecting wall of stones, and then with their ice-axes began a vigorous hoeing match on the flat shingle bed they had selected as the camping ground. Soon the place resembedresembled [sic] a nicely dug garden plot, all the stones being removed and piled upon the wall. With a sigh of satisfaction they contemplated the result of an hour's work, and, deciding the ground was too wet to pitch the tent upon, left it to dry while they prepared the lunch.

Snow had meanwhile been melting into all our available vessels from a sun-warmed rock, so water was soon boiling merrily in a methylated spirit cooker, and the whole party were revived with unlimited tea and food. Then, lazily stretched out on the sun-warmed rocks, we watched our friends, mere moving dots of black, crawl slowly foot after foot up the steep slopes of Harper's Saddle, and felt a pharisaical satisfaction that we were not, even as they, doomed to hours of heat and toil. When the last dot disappeared over the saddle we turned with a grunt of approval from the glaring glacier, and sought what shade was available for a midday nap. I was invited to transfer myself to a nest of sleeping-bags under the shadow of an overhanging boulder. Here I experienced such extremes of heat and cold as have seldom fallen to my lot. My head in the shade against the ice-cold rock was somewhere near the South Pole; my feet in the burning sunshine were most emphatically in the tropics, and but little of my person in the happy temperate zone. Consequently I twisted and turned at frequent intervals till the scraping of my nailed boots on the stones roused Graham from his