Page:Du Faur - The Conquest of Mount Cook.djvu/276

212 new building—twenty rooms added the year before and known as the annexe. These rooms are joined to the drawing-room by a small hall, to which one descends by a couple of steps. Outside fitful flashings of lightning and the first gleams of daylight showed a raging torrent sweeping beneath the annexe windows and gurgling through the piers on which the building is raised. The roar that had waked me was the grinding together of a great mass of boulders swept down from the Muller moraine by the river and deposited not ten yards from the front door. If instead of being blocked by a slight rise in the ground they had been dashed against the walls of the annexe, the latter would have caved in like so much brown paper. Fortunately it was only water that swirled and swept about the doomed building. For about half an hour no one knew what was going to happen, then the water began to recede slowly but steadily, and as no more moraine came down the danger was over for the time being. It was some time before the more nervous of the crowd could be persuaded to believe it, but at last they all returned to their rooms. Now thoroughly waked up, sleep was the last thing that occurred to me; I went to my room and put on a climbing costume with all haste, and then withdrew to the smoking-room, whose window was a good spot from which to view the flood. Here I found Graham and a couple of the maids and we soon all enjoyed a cup of tea. My eminently more sensible friends went to bed and slept till breakfast, I wandered round. Graham had flung a couple of 6-inch rafters across a raging torrent in the backyard, and had gone to the rescue of Duncan McDonald, who had been cut off the night before while away across the road (now river), milking the cows. When he was out of sight I got my camera and sneaked across too. They sagged in the middle, those rafters, in a most uncomfortable manner. I found a spot where the water was not deep and