Page:Du Faur - The Conquest of Mount Cook.djvu/72

58 horrid pictures by Doré in Dante's "Inferno," where poor tormented souls shivered in awful depths of eternal ice. They always fascinated me; now they had my heartfelt sympathy. Nothing was what it seemed to my untrained eye in this strange frozen world. Just when I was congratulating myself that we were really in for some safe, smooth going, Graham must needs go poking about with his ice-axe, and disclose a treacherous snow-hidden crevasse, and helplessly I began to wonder if there was a solid yard on this horrible mountain strong enough to bear my modest weight. My mind was chaos, my nerves on edge, but fortunately neither of these are exposed to an unsympathetic world; and my face, thanks to the long training of two brothers who jeered at me for a girl baby if I dared funk anything, was no doubt smiling and bland as that of the "heathen Chinee." Anyway no one seemed to observe anything wrong with it. Possibly the professor, who was also somewhat of an ice novice, was too concerned with the feelings in his own solar plexus to worry about me; if so, he is also able to bluff some.

Before we saw the last of the broken ice and began climbing the final snow slopes there was a steep ice wall to negotiate. This wall dropped away into the icy depths of a schrund. It was an evil-looking place, and I watched Graham cut his way up it with some anxiety. When my turn came to follow in his steps I thought of the oft-read description as applied to climbers in a like situation, "a fly on the wall." The description struck me as inadequate, the advantage being undoubtedly all with the fly; four legs in such a crisis and a horizontal position seem so much more supporting than two and an ice-axe. Then when you consider the fly can wing his way heavenwards, if he is stupid enough to fall off, while the wretched climber can only dangle in space and claw the air, or equally unsympathetic, but harder, ice, the comparison breaks down altogether. Not being of the winged tribe I was