Page:Mannering - With axe and rope in the New Zealand Alps.djvu/39

Rh The following day brought us to the Hermitage. A low mist had hidden the higher peaks throughout the day, and led to a surprise on the following morning which I little dreamt of.

I wonder if all Alpine climbers, in first 'tasting the sweets of climbing,' are similarly impressed with their initial Alpine view!

No words of mine can describe the ecstasy which seemed to pervade my whole being as on the early, cloudless morning the wonderful picture of Mount Sefton reared itself in indescribable sunlit grandeur above the old bush-clad moraine close by the Hermitage. Here, indeed, was a new and a fairy-like world to live in. As we sat in the verandah of the Hermitage the ice-seamed crags appeared to rise up and up until they culminated in a long serrated and corniced ridge, seeming almost to overhang the very spot where we rested.

A scene of mountain glory never to be forgotten, a memory to last a lifetime!

More than 8,000 feet above us were built up those ice-clad precipices, their glaciers glinting in the bright morning light, their avalanches tearing down the mountain sides and waking the echoes of a hundred ravines and valleys with their thunder.

Where is the man who can describe these palaces of Nature, whose vast walls

Have pinnacled in clouds their snowy scalps? Where is the mountaineer—not the mere gymnast, but the Nature-loving mountaineer—who can tell the feelings of such a first impression?