Page:Du Faur - The Conquest of Mount Cook.djvu/298

226 our sleeping-bags and endeavoured to forget the excitement of the coming day in sleep. As far as I can discover none but the most phlegmatic individuals ever do sleep in a bivouac the night before a big climb; the night after is another matter, and sleep comes unsought whether the bed is of rocks or down. Certainly no one lost consciousness for more than half an hour on this occasion, so when the alarum went off with a clatter at 2 a.m. there was no inducement to laziness. The morning was suspiciously warm, so our first thought was for the weather. On examining the aneroid we discovered it had fallen a point. It was still dark, but the stars were shining brightly, so we decided to disregard the warning and make a dash for our peak. By a quarter-past three we were plodding by candlelight up the steep snow slopes leading to the last rocks of the ridge. Time might mean everything to us, so we pushed on without pausing, determined to reach the end of the previous night's steps by daylight. Slowly the dawn began to break, and streaks of fiery crimson lit up a grey and sullen sky. It was beautiful, but the kind of morning no climber intent on a big expedition could view with satisfaction. We scrambled over the slippery debris of an old avalanche, and began threading our way through the crevasses of the Huddleston Glacier. In and out we clambered; great blocks and pinnacles of ice towered all around us, shutting out all view but of themselves.

At last the footsteps ended abruptly beneath a terrible sheer wall of ice, which towered above us for 20 feet. Daylight had come, so we put out our useless candles and considered how we were to get up the wall. We were standing on a good snow bridge in a huge schrund, which, as often happens on a steep slope, had one wall considerably higher than the other. Beneath us the schrund dropped away into darkness. It was not a pleasant place at all in which to risk an accident. If we could climb the wall we would be on the upper snow slopes above the worst of the