Page:Through South Westland.djvu/132

66 Some six miles off was a hut where we left the horses. We warned him of the Scorpion’s straying propensities, as he fixed up some very shaky slip-rails, but he assured us his horse would stand all day, and one would not stray without the others, so we left them. We soon found he knew no more than we did about the glacier, and we got into some strange places, and I was hauled up, and let down, and helped over many difficulties, amid much laughing. However, we did at length get on to the main body of the ice, and continued till we could see the Victoria on the left, only separated by a black wall of rock (behind which it has shrunk) and the Fox branching to the right. The whole surface hereabouts was much easier than the Franz Josef, and we did not need the hatchet at all. As at the Waiho, the gorge is filled by the ice, and the mountains are clothed with vegetation to the snow-line. I think its surroundings are grander than the Franz Josef: the mountains run up in jagged peaks and domes of snow, and one gets a better view of them from below, not being so closed-in by the mountain walls of the gorge.

The stillness up there was absolute: the ice made no strange rumblings, the river at its foot scarcely sounded, and only the singing or whistling of the birds broke the intense silence. Below us was a chain of blue lakelets or pools, and on the way back the men stayed behind to bathe, and I found my way down to the hut. It seemed odd