Page:Picturesque New Zealand, 1913.djvu/353

Rh of Mount Cook. For diversity this route across the Mount Cook Range would be difficult to surpass. The first part of the climb was steep and hard, through scrubby growth which my brown guide and I had to clutch for support; the second and last part consisted of shattered rocks and snow-fields. All the way to the bare rocks were flowers, the celmisia, the veronica, the Mountain Lily, and several other kinds; and as elsewhere in New Zealand mountains, the prevailing color was white, with yellow at intervals.

As we scrambled upward over bush and boulder and loose and broken rock masses that on the edge of cliffs seemed ever ready to form avalanches at the slightest touch, our view increased until we saw nearly the whole of the Tasman Valley with its glaciers, its moraines, and its river. Flowing into the Tasman River we beheld the Murchison River, born in the Murchison Glacier, eleven miles long. Thirty miles distant shimmered the white surface of Lake Pukaki. At the top we stood in the shades of Aorangi. Five or six miles westward, across the glacier-filled Hooker Valley, plowed by the Hooker River, rose a massive mountain form weighted with glaciers. It was Sefton, one of the finest appearing mountains of New Zealand. Its two peaks and the black cliffs below them were clear of clouds, and as it thus lifted itself high above its immediate neighbors, Sefton was a worthy rival of Aorangi at its best. From the pass Sefton appeared more effectively isolated than does Mount Cook from any part of the