Page:Du Faur - The Conquest of Mount Cook.djvu/86

68 further difficulty, but the sun was cruelly hot, and burnt down upon us from a cloudless sky, until the reflected glare from the ice was almost unbearable, in spite of dark glasses. We plodded steadily on up the steeply rising head of the glacier, and about 2 p.m. reached the bivouac, the situation of which is on a small patch of rocks at an altitude of 8,000 feet. The place was just large enough to pitch two tents; the last party had kindly removed the larger stones, and what was left was a nice assortment of small sharp stones like road metal. I suppose my expression betrayed me as I surveyed this, for Graham at once hastily assured me that it would be quite comfortable once he had picked it over a bit and made a few convenient holes. Meanwhile snow was melting off a sun-warmed rock, and running into all our available vessels. While we waited for the water the men pitched the tents, using our ice-axes for posts and the Alpine rope for a ridge pole. When pitched these tents are just about high enough to sit up straight in, and big enough to accommodate three persons comfortably. As soon as the water was ready it was put on to boil in a methylated spirit cooker, which boils two quarts in about ten minutes. After lunch we all crawled into our tents and tried to sleep. It was intensely hot; any one who had not experienced it would find it hard to believe that at an altitude of 8,000 feet, surrounded by snow and ice, one could be in a tent with the flaps open and swelter as in an oven. Sleep was impossible, so I lay with my head out of the door and looked at my surroundings. Straight in front of me was a gap like a half-circle in the Dividing Range, known as Baker's Saddle; through this I could see soft billowy clouds on the Westland side, and rising out of them the tops of the mountains. The most noticeable was Mount Sefton, a snow-crowned pyramid towering high above all else.

This new side of an old friend was disconcerting; from the Hermitage, Mount Sefton is a tremendous wall running north and south for about a quarter of a mile. From my