Page:Picturesque New Zealand, 1913.djvu/340

220 thick-soled, studded with nails that had tops as large as the heads of spikes, and further protected with metal clinchers. There were many sizes, and, I learned later, even more weights. Every wearer had a different estimate, and often, in the course of a single day, several estimates. But there was one fact about these boots that should have made them feel lighter than they were—great men had worn them, or, at least, a good number of them. And so it still is to-day: although the average visitor to the Hermitage may not by mental ability metaphorically walk in the footsteps of the great, he can walk in the boots they have worn. In addition to the Hermitage, the Tourist Department conducts several accommodation huts in the Alps. In these the beds are bunks and the cooks are guides or porters. Two of these huts are on the Tasman Glacier route. The majority of climbers via this glacier end their first day's excursion at Ball Hut, fourteen miles from the Hermitage and thirty-four hundred feet above the sea. This hut can be reached on horseback, but not so Malte Brun Hut, nine miles beyond it at an altitude of fifty-seven hundred feet, to which all supplies are carried on porters' backs. The goal of the majority of visitors to the Hermitage is the Tasman Glacier and the peaks, ridges, and domes that wall it in on the west and north. The Tasman Glacier is the grand parade of the Southern Alps. Into it a half-dozen large ice streams flow, and along it are ranged a score of mountains from nine thousand to