Page:Mannering - With axe and rope in the New Zealand Alps.djvu/144

98 the rope as Dixon followed, when suddenly he went through up to his armpits and was dangling in space, held up by a thin crust of snow and by the rope from above. I pulled with the strength of despair, and Dixon struggled till he secured a hold somehow on the other lip of the crevasse and got out.

That sort of thing is all very well to look back upon and talk over afterwards, but I am not likely to forget for many a long day the sensation of holding up a thirteen-stone man under such circumstances, and I must say that I should have been much easier in my mind if we had had such a man as Emil Boss or Ulrich Kaufmann on one end of the rope.

Immediately after crossing the big bergschrund stepcutting commenced; and from this point upwards every step, other than those on rocks, had to be cut in hard ice.

It is no easy task after climbing steadily for nine hours in soft snow to set to work and cut steps, especially when one knows that a slip must on no account be made, for with two men only on the rope it would mean a sudden descent to the crevasses or precipices (as the case may be) below, and our certain destruction.

An hour's steady work and we gained the foot of the lowest rocks, which were found to be quite unscalable. We then sidled round the base of these rocks to the left and commenced cutting steps up the first couloir, keeping close into the rocks on our right, on which we could get an occasional hand-grip. Ice blocks were continually coming down from the broken masses overhanging the top of the couloir, but luckily none struck us. The descent of an ice block in