TWO MOUNTAINEERING BOOKS.*
THE time cannot be far distant when New Zealand will become one of the world's playgrounds, for few countries offer such a variety of first-class sport. The trout-fishing can hardly be paralleled, the scenery has every type of magnifi- cence, and the mountaineering, though now there are no virgin peaks, is as difficult and varied as the most exacting climber could demand. Mr. Malcolm Ross in hie light-hearted -a) d Man. fa New Zealand. By Malcolm Ems. %Landau :I:Edward Arnold. S. not.]—(2) Kid" and Lahoul. By Lieut.-Col. thenoa, C. G. Bruce, M.V.O. [Br. 6d. set.] and admirably written volume of reminiscences tells the story of the slow conquest of the New Zealand giants and of many other upland wanderings. The pioneer work was undertaken by young New Zealanders who had never been trained in the Alps, and who had to find out their snowcraft and rockcraft for themselves. There were no mountain hotels, and, of course, no huts; and since the glens and glaciers of New Zealand are peculiarly difficult to traverse, the pioneers had a laborious time of it. It says a great deal for the good sense and stamina of the native climbers that, in spite of many adventurous expeditions, those early days had no fatal accident to mar their record. Mr. Ross rejoices in this immunity, but the other day Mount Cook claimed its first victim. The part of mountaineering which an amateurlearns moat slowly is route-fording, and it was natural that a good many false starts should be made in the assaults upon the greater peaks. Mount Cook, the highest summit in Australasia, was the chief object of ambition, and as early as 1882 an English climber, the Rev. W. S. Green, with two Swiss guides, had all bat reached the summit, when he was forced back by bad weather. This stimulated the ardour of the islanders, and Mr. Ross tells amusingly of his first climbing essays in the " eighties," and the hardships of carry- ing heavy packs up unconscionable moraines and hummocky glaciers. New Zealand mountain weather seems to be of the Scottish variety—uncertain, but generally inclining to rain. The conquest of Mount Cook was not accomplished till 1894, and Mr. Ross recounts in great detail the story of the achieve. ment. Failing to complete Mr. Green's route, Mr. Fyfe and Mr. Graham, both New Zealanders, attempted another way from the Hooker Glacier, and on Christmas Day stood on the summit snows. That was the end of the monarch's isolation. It has now been frequently climbed and traversed, occasionally by ladies, but it remains a severe course, requiring very con- siderable endurance and technical skill. One of Mr. Rose's best chapters describes the first traverse of the peak which he made in 1905 with three companions. He had a weak ankle to begin with, but the party were favoured with good weather, and reached the top in some thirteen hours from the Bivouac Rock. The descent to the Hooker Glacier was a difficult task, and had to be made against time. On the ridge there was a certain amount of lowering by means of a doubled rope—always an unpleasant business—and then came step-cutting down a two-thousand-feet couloir. When at length the glacier was reached they had been climbing pretty constantly for some twenty-three hours, with little to eat and drink. Then came eleven miles in the dark down a much-crevassed glacier and the valley beyond before they found food and shelter. Assuredly the New Zealand wheel of Alpinists are no shirkers.
Some of Mr. Ross's most attractive chapters deal with rambling in other districts than that of the Mount Cook group, and with pass-finding. He tells us of the fiord region of the extreme south, and the wonderful walk to Milford Sound, which combines the attractions of a rich Highland glen, Alpine passes, and Norwegian fiords. Unlike some climbers, he has an eye for other things than rock and snow, and describes lovingly the strange bird-life of these uplands. But if we had to give our vote for the most entertaining section of the book, it would be for the account of the crossing of the main range by Mr. Rosa and Mr. Fyfe by way of the Tasman Glacier and the Wataroa River. They reached the top of the pass just before dawn, and found the descent on the western side both difficult and dangerous. They could afford to waste no time, for the place would be a trap for avalanches as soon as the sun was up. Mr. Fyfe hurt his leg badly, but they succeeded in getting out of the snow and ice region into a valley of tropical luxuriance. That evening at six o'clock they encamped beside the river alter "sixteen hours' toil, during which we bad carried swags over by far the roughest pass ever made in New Zealand." Their troubles were not over, for the valley was a jungle and wholly unexplored, their food was done, and they had no notion when they would reach a human habitation. Happily they found a hot spring, and got a bath which revived their weary limbs. Mr. Fyfe's leg became very bad, and they were pretty nearly at their last gasp when, like Robinson Crusoe, they found on the river shingle the footprints of a man, and a little later came upon a settler's homestead. It was a fine piece of pioneering, .and a remarkable experience, possible _only fox climbers in a new laud. Another story of enduranoes which Mr. Ross tells strikes us as one of the most marvellous in mountaineering annals. A Scottish climber, Mr. R. S. Low, while descending alone the couloir from Graham's Saddle, fell, and was badly mauled on some jagged rocks. He lay for some time unconscious, and then in the afternoon, when the snow was soft, he managed to descend without an ice-axe by kicking holes in the snow. He spent the night on the glacier endeavouring to stanch the bleeding of his wounds. All next day he crawled down the ice in acute pain, and slept the night under a boulder. On the following day it snowed heavily, and be could not move; but the day after he set out again, and crawled as far as the Bivouac Rock. Here he remained for six days, till lie was found by a search party from the Hermitage. When the accident happened he had one day's provisions in his knapsack, and these had to last him ten days. At the end he was reduced to two pinches of cocoa per day. He completely recovered; but the adventure is a wonderful instance of moral tenacity and physical enduranoe, and a solemn warning against one-man expeditions in the high mountains.
In hilts and Lahoul Lieutenant-Colonel Bruce, of the 6th Gurkhas, whose knowledge of the Himalaya is probably un- surpassed to-day, tells of a holiday taken by himself, his wife, a brother-officer, and a Swiss guide in that part of the range which lies due north of Simla. They set out in the right holiday spirit, without any fixed purpose. "No great terror of a peak of twenty-five thousand feet always at the back of my mind! Time to enjoy my country, and wander in it, too, if I like ; time to do anything that takes my fancy and pro- mises to pay, either from its intrinsic merits as a mountain or as a point likely to give good views of the surrounding country ; and, lastly, time to go shooting, if I feel so inclined." They got very little shooting, but abundance of climbing, and they penetrated many beautiful and little-known upland valleys in the height of their summer beauty. In that part of the Himalaya things are on an Alpine rather than on a typically Himalayan scale, and there are no great peaks over twenty thousand feet to unsettle the climber's mind. Lahour is more Tibetan in character, with bleak valleys and n people who profess a debased Buddhism ; Kula, further south, is rich and picturesque, and its inhabitants favour an equally debased Hinduism. The place, indeed, is the home of the old devil-worship of the Mlle, and the innumerable gods of halm are of a peculiarly jealous breed. Colonel Bruce had no luck with them. He omitted to offer a red goat to one and a small silver horse to another, with the result that Nemesia overtook him, and lie was out of action much of the time with torn muscles and a dislocated shoulder. Consequently the high snows were not often for him; but the guide Fiihrer and a Gurkha orderly made some fine ascents, and with Captain Todd ascended a very difficult rock peak of nineteen thousand five hundred feet. A performance such as this, Colonel Bruce thinks, is the chief ground for the hope that man may yet conquer some of the giants. "Men who have the necessary physique to do difficult gymnastics at twenty thousand feet can, I am sure, on suitable ground, add another six thousand feet to this." For big expeditions be advocates the highest camp possible, and not too early a start, for in the early morning a man's vitality is low and his resistance to cold much less.
The book is full of delightful pictures of scenery and people, sympathetically observed and vividly presented. For any future holiday-makers in these regions it will be an invaluable guide. The region is a curious meeting-place of the old and the new, for at one monastery a lama asked permission to photograph the party, and produced an up-to-date Kodak of an expensive pattern. Captain Todd contributes an interesting chapter on the history and folk-lore of the hills, and Mrs. Bruce has written a charming account of the expedition from a woman's point of view, with many details as to housekeeping difficulties and as to the life of the valleys, which she could study at leisure. The picture of the Moravian Mission at Kyelang, with its simple wisdom and happy industry, is not the least attractive part of an attractive book.
Previous page
