Page:Mannering - With axe and rope in the New Zealand Alps.djvu/124

86 evidently leading into the Whymper Glacier, and so on to the Wataroa River of the west coast. Following round the range to the right a very fine mountain stands boldly up; to the right of this, again, is situated yet another snow saddle, which we concluded must lead into the Classen Glacier.

The result of the Government survey of the Murchison Glacier, just completed (1891), confirms our surmises regarding the topography of this interesting district.

We were astonished at the great length which the Liebig Range assumes, for it bounds the glacier throughout the whole of its eastern side, diverging from the main chain of the Southern Alps some distance north of the Hochstetter Dome.

Any attempt at a description of the panorama from our saddle would be useless to convey an adequate idea of the view. Harper classed it as similar in character to the views obtained at high altitudes in the Bernese Oberland. An aneroid reading gave our height as about 7,900 feet, but this was much out, as by the recent survey the height of the saddle has been trigonometrically determined as 7,194 feet. Our estimate of the length of the glacier at the time was twelve miles, and the survey has now fixed it at eleven and a half, whilst the average width is as nearly as possible one mile.

Reaching the saddle into the Tasman was now quite out of the question, for it would involve a descent to the valley below, the crossing of the upper parts of the glacier, and the scaling of more snow slopes, which appeared to us to be impracticable owing to the