Page:Mannering - With axe and rope in the New Zealand Alps.djvu/66

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CHAPTER V

THIRD ATTEMPT TO CLIMB AORANGI

Photography on the Tasman Glacier—Attempt to scale Mount De la Bêche

Where rose the mountains, there to him were friends.—Childe Harold.

is a thousand pities that the ennobling pursuit of mountaineering is so neglected in this wonderland of peaks and glaciers. Such advantages as we enjoy surely cannot exist much longer without calling out the spirit which lies dormant in hundreds of the lovers of adventure and worshippers of the beautiful in Nature, who live on in our midst from day to day in a conventional and monotonous round.

There are pleasures in the pursuit of adventure amongst the great snow-fields and glaciers which only those who are initiated can thoroughly enjoy.

Ask the man who goes climbing what these pleasures are, and he cannot tell you, he cannot define them—yet he feels them, and they are ever luring him on. They are indefinite, inexpressible; but there is a sort of 'mountain fever' which comes when one has once 'lost one's heart to the great mountains.' In the work all a man's best physical, and many of his mental, powers are brought out and strengthened. There is the energy, perseverance, and patience to last through a long day's