Page:Du Faur - The Conquest of Mount Cook.djvu/310

234 of finding the right pass. The descent was easy. It led us under the rocks of the arête and followed along beside them. Suddenly we heard far away beyond us the roaring of a torrent. We paused to listen, and the guides declared it must be Scott's Creek. If so, we were not so very far out of our way. Broken ice loomed up ahead of us. There was no way of getting round it, so into it we went. It had been a day of adventures and surprises, and this broken ice was the finishing touch. We really performed some strange feats in our passage through it. The snow turned to rain as we began to get lower, and at last through the drizzle we distinguished a big snow-field to the left of us. Thomson let out a shout of joy on recognizing it as the one we were looking for, and, immensely relieved, we hurried towards it. Crossing it we kept along the ridge, almost running in our excitement and relief. Another shout announced the site of last year's high bivouac. We were safe as far as knowing where we were, but it was 6 p.m. on a wet evening, and we had thousands of feet to descend to the valley through very rough country. This was no easy task in daylight, and in the dark we might easily come to grief. On we raced along the ridge, but when we came to the steep grass slopes, soaked and slippery with snow and rain, we had to slow down and descend them with the utmost care. More than once the rope saved one of us from a nasty fall; it took us an hour to descend them. Then Thomson made a traverse into some scrub, through which we had a desperate battle; the bushes closed over our heads, and creepers and roots tripped up our feet. We emerged into a steep stony creek-bed scratched and breathless. We followed the creek-bed down, climbing over wet rocks and slipping into pools and waterfalls; we were soon soaked through, and plastered with mud. The last 100 feet of the creek were very bad, and we congratulated ourselves that we got down them in the last gleams of daylight. Darkness overtook us at the junction of our