Page:Mannering - With axe and rope in the New Zealand Alps.djvu/59

Rh sopping or floating about in the dark, and in imminent danger of being washed away.

Hurriedly we collected all we could into our blanket-bags, got into our boots somehow, and made for higher ground. We could not see a rise in the ground, but after wading about found a small portion out of water, and, with much strong language and trouble, succeeded in repitching the tent—after a fashion.

Ah! well do we remember the miseries and discomforts of the scene. Wind blowing in fitful gusts, rain coming down in sheets, while thunder and lightning and the incessant roar of the Tasman all tended to make the scene one of terror and discomfort. Matches nearly all destroyed; bread reduced to a state of pulp; blankets and clothes wet; instruments, boots, ropes, ice-axes muddled up anywhere, some in the tent, some being silted up or washed away from the spot where the tent was first pitched; the floor of the tent now hard, wet stones, in lieu of comfortable, dry tussock. Oh, the misery of it!

We lay in our wet clothes the rest of that night, all the following day, and the next night. Inglis and I scarcely stirred but to eat some disgusting, soppy mixture or to light our pipes; but Dixon pluckily rigged up a breakwind with an old tent left by the Birch Hill shepherds, and after three hours' persistent labour kindled a fire, improvising a chimney out of a pair of white flannel trousers and sundry other garments!

We were quite hemmed in by water, and were in a constant state of anxiety lest the river should make