Page:Mannering - With axe and rope in the New Zealand Alps.djvu/141

Rh But the wind had risen quickly and was blowing a gale from the south-west—the cold quarter. To face such a wind for any length of time, or to attempt to climb Aorangi against it, would be simple madness, so we turned and ignominiously fled to the refuge of our bivouac, 1,200 feet below, which we reached at seven o'clock, having been but three hours absent.

We then sent Annan down, as we were keeping him from his work in the lower country, telling him to leave word with the survey party that if we did not arrive back at the Ball Glacier by Monday night something would probably have gone amiss with us.

During the day the gale blew itself out, and next morning at 3.45 we were in our steps of the day before, reaching the plateau in an hour and a half. The morning sun lit up the peaks with a rosy glow, soon his piercing beams forced us to put on the goggles, while the crust of the snow began to soften under the great power of penetration which the rays possess in the rarefied air. This forced us to plod onward in slushy snow as we headed right for the Linda Glacier, which we could see rounding the point of the north-eastern arête of our mountain.

On our right rose Mount Tasman clothed in ice, from which during the night an immense avalanche had descended. We walked close to its furthest point of motion as it lay stretched out on the level snow-field like a gigantic breakwater, and found it to be 300 paces in width; Dixon estimated that it covered from forty to fifty acres.

We now put on the rope, as crevasses began to appear in the gently rising slopes to the Linda Glacier.