Page:Du Faur - The Conquest of Mount Cook.djvu/260

202 it and Mount Tasman ran the curved coast line, till it lost itself behind the maze of northward mountains. Beside us the Tasman Glacier swept its fourteen miles in gracious curves, crowned on either hand with New Zealand's greatest peaks, their white summits shimmering in the sun, or contrasted boldly against some rocky giant, on whose precipitous side no snow might lodge. We spent half an hour on this summit drinking in beauty at every breath. Also, it must be confessed, since this is a practical world, we fed and took photographs. Then we were ready to start on the last and worst part of our long journey.

Ever since we had decided to attempt the traverse, the steep knife-edge ridge between the middle and high peak had been to me a haunting horror. From wherever you look upon it it appears impossible. Now, the moment I had dreaded had arrived, and the reality was all that imagination had pictured it. Steep, narrow, and horribly corniced, the ridge dropped sharply for a hundred feet. More than once as we descended it an icy shiver ran down my spine, as the ice-axe sank deeply into the overhanging cornice, and on withdrawal disclosed through the tiny hole the awful gap between us and the glacier thousands of feet beneath. Later, when we compared notes, we all confessed to wondering what would happen if a cornice broke away. Would the shock startle us into eternity? The mere noise and vibration of the falling mass would be enough to shake the strongest nerves, and we only stood about two feet from the junction of solid ice and cornice. At last we accomplished the many windings of the arête, and started up the highest peak. The relief of ascending with a wall in front to look at was tremendous, after the nerve-racking, downward ridge of the last hour. Fate was kind again, and we only had an hour's step-cutting on the final slope.

At half-past one we stood on the highest summit of Mount Cook, conquerors indeed. We were filled with mingled