By Mountain, Lake and Clacier.

New Zealand Graphic, 25 December 1905, Page 14

By Mountain, Lake and Clacier.

Impressions of . the New Zealand Alps.

By

Thomas Pringle,

Wellington

\ F a i r 1 i e on wa rcls the . \\.|H; j* rvtf Y>/ monotonous coach journey over khaki-coloured, veldt-like plains and undulating hills, could only ' l )e redeemed from abject wearincss by some Hugh Miller. We sc em to be getting into the heart ‘’f things, about to witness the *•' w x. x-s. marvels of creation. I hese rich Canterbury plains just left, glowing in golden harvest tints, what are they but decomposed shingle tali on the greatest scale? These undulating hills arc no mure than ancient lateral moraines: these plains but ancient lake beds filled—as Lake Pukaki is being filled to-day—with glacier-worn deposits: those huge ice-borne erratics breaking the tussocky expanse with spots of blackness our geologist recognises as from Cook, Malte Brun, Leibig, where not! till later on he draws our wondering eyes to the self-same processes actively operating. Weary day draws to tiring evening. Loquacious passengers have long since succumbed to the dreary sameness of tussock downs; conversational amenities long since reduced to monosyllabic brevities. The silence suddenly broken by a staccato chorus, “Magnificent! bar below, the opalescent gleam of Lake Pukaki, indescribably wonderful in its turquoise shading to pearly cream, peacock to delicate greeny white. Aorangi, Tasman, Haidinger, Sefton, just tipped with day's departing rays, the whole glorious range duplicated in the silent waters. Magnificent! What a feeble epithet for such a vision of the Delectable Mountains! With sunset comes an ice-cold breeze, sponging out with gentle ripples the fairy-like reflections. Mysterious clouds from nowhere fill up each darkening valley ; unreal mountain tips left floating in delicate ether, slowly disappearing in a robc-de-niiit as the mists rise in the chilly air. Next morning we round Lake Pukaki. robbed now of all its indescribable flashings of opal and turquoise, lying ominously quiet, steely-cold, repellantly menacing; our Delectable Mountains lost in swirling clouds, ominously black; the Tasman Valley blocked apparently by the rugged cliffs of Sefton, closing in like a gloomy canyon between Cook and Seeley’ Ranges; thunder booming, avalanches reverberating, clouds -.weeping in a wild witches’ orgy, demented, distracted, pitilessly lashing us with stinging hail —a valley of deepest gloom, forbidding in the extreme. We understand now how the brilliant but venturesome orator of old Maoridom would thrill the assembled hanu with talcs of roaring taniwha guarding these regions of perpetual ice and snow . Wonderful though these first contrasting visions from Pukaki and Tasman \ alley were. 1 am fain to confess that the most impressive approaches to our Southern Alps are from the west, cither by way of Fox (ilacier. Francis Joseph Glacier, or Copland Valley'. The two former arc available only to experienced climbers, the latter to anyone fairly endowed with physical endurance. Nothing quite so fine is to be found on the cast as the Karangarua River, with its splendid gorges; or the Copland River, with its extraordinary boulders and more wonderful hot springs. Nothing nearly so impressive as the amphitheatre of stupendous cliffs on the western faces of Sefton or La Perouse. Nothing nearly so interesting as the sharp transition from the exotic luxuriance of sea

level, through matted bush—the densest I know of in New Zealand—dense scrub, Alpine flora, up to the region of mosses, lichens, and absolute bareness. Guide Clark is fortunate in possessing an invaluable quality—he instinctively inspires confidence. As one of half-a-dozen who have conquered Mount Cook, you naturally regard him with jealous admiration, possibly envy. But I confess my child-like faith was somewhat strained as I watched him turning my already heavy boots into veritable kedge-anchors, studding them with pound after pound of heavy nails. But when you have spent a few days in preliminary exercises—skipping, for example, from rock to rock of the extremely rough surface moraine of the Mueller Glacier—faith returns in the author of your ironclad understandings. Admiration. too, though I never got quite so far as the young lady tourist: “Clark, you’re a perfect deer!" swiftly altered to, “I mean you're a regular goat!” blushing confusion and further emendations being lost in general laughter. Following the bottom of a V-shaped gorge formed by the Mount Cook Range and the lateral moraine of the Tasman Glacier, the Ball Hut track is scarcely interesting. Sometimes scrambling along the ice-de-posited moraine, stretching for miles like a hastilydeposited pile of Brobdignagian building material: sometimes down the avalanche faces, where fitful missiles lend a spice of danger to the journey. Louder reports than usual, thousands of feet overhead, are followed by a brisk cannonade, great boulders spin down the steep incline, invisibly swift except for a second as they touch earth, raise clouds of dust, bound another hundred yards, more dust, then the final crash. The air is filled with flying splinters like the bursting of a bomb, and another chain or two of track is obliterated—exciting work, fortunately not usual. Daylight, laden with chill blasts from the glacier, finds us swag-burdened cn route for Malte Brun Hut. Warily negotiating the maze of boulder-strewn ice waves, timidly balancing along sharp glacier crests, skirting yawning crevasses, fearsome and apparently fathomless, our progress materially hindered by my never-satisfied delight in the deep moulins of palest bluegreen. deepening almost imperceptibly to the darkest indigo, finally black, the delicacy and richness of their gradations hopelessly impossible of transfer to the artist’s canvas, still less to the photographer's dry plate. Two miles of sudatory struggle brings us abreast the great Hochstetter ice Fall, still swathed in mist clouds, lingeringly clinging to the fitfully-seen slopes of rugged Mount Cook, vainly resisting Sol's dispersive attacks, gradually rising higher and higher, curtain-like, till the following eye has the whole magnificent four thousand feet of congealed cataract, a perfect Niagara of enormous seracs, the further four thousand feet of highest Aorangi just flecked here and there by floating rags of pink-tinged cloudlets. Nothing in the whole Alps is

more sublime: nothing within comparatively easy reach of the average tourist so indescribably magnificent, as the first sight of this colossal ice fall. Closer acquaintance adds admiration to wonder. Magnitude begins to be dimly apprehended—the seeming few hundred yards grows to a mile wide of Arctic valleys, with here and there glittering ice caves fretted into thousands of flashing facets. Imagination is stimulated amidst its fantastic weatherworn sculptures; fear also by its ponderous avalanches, quaint slabs, grotesque pyramids, symmetrical cubes, immense seracs, pyriform poised like enormous cryptogramic creations, spires and steeples large enough for the dome of St. Paul's or the spires of the Dorn at Koln, incipient architecture worthy of Cheops. Pressure from above, sunrays from below, constantly working marvels with its melting plasticity. Whilst you gaze and wonder a Milan cathedral falls to ruin, the thunderous roar rattling and reverberating from cliff to cliff, its place taken by a newly-created Taj-Mahal gleaming and glistening palest green, crowned with marble white—incessant destruction, tireless rebuilding. What an interminable twelve miles it seemed from hut to hut! What a wearisome heading of crevasses, circuitous circumvention of ice cliffs, diffident adventure across problematically safe snow bridges, hopeless mazes amongst tumbled ice-falls! Oh. that hut! Apparently so near, yet ever seemingly receding in spite of our wearied struggles. Reached in the afterglow of a Turneresque sunset, strenuous struggle is forgotten in the marvellous prospect. Immediately behind, the peak of Malte Brun: to the right, leonine Mount Darwin and the perfect dome of Hochstetter: unsealed Elie de Beaumont, the impossible cone of Mount Stuart, rugged De la Beche and the Minarets directly opposite; then Haast, Haidinger, Tasman and Silberhorn. Finally the eye rests lingeringly on the dominating vastness of Aorangi. its highest points flushing rosily with a life-like glow, too soon, alas! departing. With nightfall the blushing siren changes Niobelike. Her peaks and cliffs become featurelessly forbidding in the gathering gloom, coldly emotionless, stolidly sentinel. Amidst these vast silences of night, how absurdly, oppressively insignificant one feels; how overwhelmed with a sense of littleness, unimportance, impotence. How near at times Charon seems! One false step, a moment’s hesitancy, a sweeping avalanche, the solid similitude of a yawning crevasse, its horrid chasm lightly covered with smiling snow, the seeming solidity of a cornice, all avant couriers of the son of Erebus and Nox! To the strenuous all sounding a constant challenge, to the timorous a constant menace. ***** The dyspeptic insomniac eats and sleeps in these bracing altitudes with unwonted heartiness. The guide’s pre-daybreak call sounds cruelly dutiful, but slightly modified .by the graceful aroma of steaming

Mocha and the cheerful clatter of preparations for breakfast. Outside, the air has an icy tang, cuttingly sharp, searchingly biting. Reaction soon comes with upward progress, and numbed extremities glow with almost uncomfortable warmth.

It is our maiden effort at climbing. With meek obedience Clark’s footsteps are implicitly followed. Doubt intrudes, fear, almost funk. Then a saving glim-

mer of humour. The whole thing is a huge joke! We are never expected to crawl up that perpendicular rock face! We are. though, and do. With quiet assurance our instructions are. “Keep cool,” “Take it steadily.” “Make sure of every handgrip and toe rest.” and, to our own astonishment, we are soon spreadeagled half-way up. Little later the difficulty is surmounted, only to be encountered half-a-dozen times, till finally we reach the outermost point of a projecting buttress, panting, perspiring. Amongst other wishes, oh, for a loan of Sindbad’s Roc or the Enchanted horse! Only 9,000 feet above sea level, and right behind us the last 1,200 feet of Malte Brun, apparently vertical. What a glorious panorama of glacier, icecrowned peaks, untrodden snow-fields! Range after range, north, south, west. The great Tasman Glacier far below visible for almost its complete eighteen miles. What a magnificent, stately sweep it presents, its graceful curves the very poetry of form! From this height baffling mazes of crevasse resolve themselves into regular semi-circular ploughings. Chaotic ice-falls, yesterday so tiresome, now assume due proportion as mere ripples in the gigantic icestream. Darwin, Prinz Rudolf, Haast, I lochstetter. Ball and countless other glaciers each swelling the great frozen cataract, the largest tributaries temporally deflecting the main stream with curious ripplings. In this crystalline atmosphere distance is most deceptive, few things more difficult to attain than a due sense of proportion. That point just across the Mueller Glacier, temptingly inviting an after-dinner saunter, takes at least a couple of hours’ hard walking. That silver thread far below, glistening amongst the dull morainic debris, is an impassable river. Those tinsel threads

gleaming down the ranges compel careful negotiation on closer acquaintance, as they dash impetuously down their boulderstrewn courses. Joyously leaping and dashing in their new-born strength, wildly delighting in their release from glacier prison, how little they dream of the gloomy disappearance so close at hand! With what sullen murmurings they disappear into dark ice tunnels beneath the main glacier, reappearing miles below at the terminal face with geyser-like spoutings, where their real race seaward begins.

How difficult to realise those rugged, cornice-tipped peaks of Sefton are a mile and a-half vertically above the Hermitage! That Aorangi towers more than two miles above us! But when you have spent laborious hours climbing Mount Ollivier to view the first, or Ball Pass to view the latter, and still find each the better part of a mile overhead, some faint idea of their magnitude begins to be appreciated. So that, whilst distance is needed to correctly gauge relative heights, and Mount Cook only stands pre-eminent—like Joseph’s sheaf —when viewed from fifty miles away, altitude and propinquity are equally necessary to a due understanding of magnitude and detail. Mountains must be viewed from mountains —from below, their perspective is distorted and bulk dwarfed.

Climbing the Ball Pass in the early rawness of an autumn morning, great seas of rolling clouds beneath, sunrise just tinting opening masses beyond the ranges, was a delightful experience.

Mountain tops seemed to float like islands on a sea of down, the soft draperies beneath opening and closing like some garment, its wearer doubtfully undetermined whether to discard or not. Indeed, I doubt if anything gave greater pleasure than the wonderful phenomena of cloud-form and colour amongst the mountains. Never by any chance those great banks of billowy cumulus so common round the coasts, restfully floating like browsing flocks; but broken up into a thousand strange forms, now like the feathery wings of Ariel, or as if some great magician had distorted and magnified millions of times snow crystal forms; again, as if their passage across the rugged peaks had shredded them into filaments light as thistle-down. Now gloriously transparent against a sky of turquoise; later, spun magically into Oriental riot of gorgeous colouring—a Penelope work-basket of rainbow hues.

This startling changefulness never lost its glamour; the eye never wearied of their swift transitions. As we wait and watch, from the west steal invisible moisture-laden currents, condensing on the cold mountain tops, till each peak waves a filmy banner, advancing, receding, disappearing, then re-forming

like returning messengers, scouts of the great cohort marshalling behind, reconnoitring down valleys, spying across glaciers, investigating aretes, couloirs, cols, visibly growing in number, density; hovering hither and thither with tumultuous agitation; finally, in one great enveloping movement, blotting out peaks and glaciers. Sometimes lying in great dappled masses, motionless as shady forest leaves at stillest noon, or sweeping up from south, formless, clammy, fearsome; now pouring hot haste through the passes, whistling and whining; often, as through Fitzgerald’s Pass, streaming hastily, only to be caught by stronger crosscurrents from St. David’s Dome and Baker’s Saddle, stretching attenuated tentacles in a vain endeavour to reach Aorangi; finally beaten back along the Moorehouse Range to mass in one long, champing legion, restlessly pawing, or like a great foamy breaker perpetually returning upon itself. These are but an inadequate few of the many aspects of Alpine cloud, coming as Mondamin came to Hiawatha :•— “From the empty air appearing, Into empty air returning Taking shape when earth it touches, But invisible to all men In its coming and its going.’’

Descending the Tasman Glacier in the dim hour preceding dawn. one is impressed with the incalculable force its silently moving mass must exert. To me,

this eighteen miles by two, with a depth of anything from 500 to 1.000 feet, seemed the most prodigious engine of beneficent destruction imaginable, quietly resolving into their constituent elements the cast-off debris of the mountains, and on the largest scale fulfilling that pessimistic note, "That He who wrought me into shape, should stamp me back to common earth again!”

Into the silent darkness anon there come rosy flushes on the highest peaks—harbinger of dawn, renaissance of after-glow. Avalanches sound the reveille of another day, with deep basso profundo saluting sunrise. Had Mendelssohn been there, he would have used them as majestic opening chords of a Tasman Symphony. Thin ice breaking all around with a musical snap—staccato

harmonics. Tiny runnels begin journeying with a fluty clearness, rippling cadenzas of mellow sweetness. New crevasses burst with sharp report, as clash of cymbals tn a pianissimo passage. Up each moulin come querulous. reedy notes, very legato. Beneath all a deep diapason sustaining, harmonising the collective murmurings of gathering waters.

Seen in mass, glacier ice invokes surprise or wonder. At times so blackened with sand or covered with moraine as to excite scepticism. Once or twice in my limited experience involuntary breaks through fragile snow-bridges have revealed most marvellous valleys of jewels, fairy ice palaces. Waitomo stalactites and stalagmites done in purest crystal, flashing with diamond brightness in their high lights, unutterable depths of amethyst in their shadows. The fascination of climbing—either as climbing photographer or photographic climber —I am quite unable to explain. I am content that it is so. Not only content, but looking forward hopefully to future opportunities. Those who are content to follow the comparatively easy route up the Tasman Glacier, for example, are rewarded with wonderful Alpine scenery; but how much they miss who forego the ascent to the lower slopes of Mount Chudleigh. from whence the Mount Cook group—Aorangi. Silberhorn. Tasman. Haast, Haidinger—seem like a mighty girdle. Hochstetter Falls a jewelled clasp, Haast Glacier a gemstudded buckle.