THE NEW ZEALAND ALPS.*
Tuts is as good a book of travels as we have met with for a long -time. It combines the qualities of brevity, clearness, and interestin.gness, and though it contains an account of the most sensational mountain experience ever undergone, it is singularly free from sensational writing. It is, too, conspicuous among the lucabrations of the Alpine Club for the absence both of gash, and of that peculiar humour which generally makes the accounts of mountain expeditions which adorn the Alpine Journal, in which a great part of this book first appeared, so deplorably dull.
The great object of Mr. Green's voyage was the ascent of Mount Cook, the monarch of mountains, in what are somewhat absurdly called the Southern Alps. Mount Cook does not stand where he did in the scale of height. Housed at one time to be called 17,000 feet ; even as late as 1875, in the official handbook for New Zealand, he was put at 14,000 feet ; but in 1881, his exact measurement was taken trigonometrically, and he has been found to be only 12,349 feet. He can no longer, there- fore, boast of being taller than the European monarch, or even of being quite in the first class of Alpine summits. Still, his height is very respectable, and in the way of his surround. ing,s he beats all his European rivals. The Tasman glacier is eighteen miles long and three miles wide, while the great ice-stream of Switzerland, the Aletsch, is only fifteen miles long, and never more than a mile wide. Nor can the Swiss mountains boast that they roll their ice-streams within a quarter of a mile of the sea, and that the ocean is clearly visible from their tops, as can their New Zealand rivals. On the other hand, the S wise Alps possess in abundance that great essential to fine scenery, "good hotels in the foreground," which are conspicuous by their absence in New Zealand, unless a hotel twenty miles or so away could be taken into the picture. But it is the little hardships and unpleasantnesses which make travels easy and pleasant both to write and to read, and there- fore from the literary, whatever it may be from the artistic, point of view, the absence of the hotels is not a matter of regret for Mr. Green, or for us.
Mr. Green was singularly lucky, too, in the unpleasantnesses he experienced on his voyage out. He went in a different ship and by a different route from his guides, Boss, the landlord of the Bear, at Grindelwald, and Kaufmann ; who, by the way, after having helped Mr. Green up Mount Cook, are now assisting Mr. Graham in the exploration of the peaks of the Abode of Snow itself. The guides went safely and quickly through the Suez Canal. Mr. Green went round the Cape, and passed through the awful ordeal of quarantine, owing to an outbreak of small- pox in the ship. At the Cape they were not allowed to land, and had to get their coal in mid-sea, from coal hulks sent out to them, which had themselves to undergo quarantine before they were used again. On arriving in Australia, they were not allowed to go up to Melbourne, but sent to the Quarantine Hospital at Point Nepean, where a part of the peninsula was fenced off for the purpose. The arrangements on their first landing seemed eminently qualified to make as many people ill as possible, owing to no food being supplied for twenty-four hours after they arrived, and even afterwards "the hours for meals were never fixed, dinner being served any time between one and seven p.m." Here Mr. Green, having gone out with a friend for a night or two in the" bush," narrowly escaped terminating his attempt on Mount Cook by an incarceration in Australia for running away from quarantine. When at last they were set free from quarantine, the voyage to New Zealand must have been ample recompense for the previous discomforts. The ship on its way visited the Sounds of the South Island, which alone wotdd.be worth a 12,000 miles' voyage to see :—
" In Milford Sound, vertical cliffs rise for thousands of feet on
either hand Waterfalls resembling the Staubbach came
• Tho High Alps of Mao Zealand. By William 8pottitiwoode Green, M.A. London Macmillan and Co, 1883.
down the cliffs from far above the clouds, and were blown -away into spray, while in mid-air, by the fury of the storm. Wherever vegeta- tion could get a footing on these immense precipices, lovely tree ferns and darker shrubs grew in profusion, all dripping with moisture, and running up the cliffs in long strips of verdure, till lost to our view aloft in the torn, white mists The totara pines, draped with festoons of grey lichens, contrasted well with the soft green of the great fern fronds, and formed a suitable background to the scarlet blossoms of the rata, which here and there lit up the upper surface of the forest with patches of intense colour."
But the best bit of all was in the George Sound:—
" When about twelve miles from the sea we reached the ianer
sanctuary, a fitting home of the.nymphs The screw ceased its motion, the eddy of the fall drew us along ; grazing the rocks, and trees, which hung their branches almost over our deck, we slipped past a point and entered a little basin. Immediately before us the foaming fall plunged into the Sound, filling the air with its roar. For a moment we felt as if we were at the bottom of a deep well, so small was the patch of sky overheard, the walls of forest all around rising rapidly for 3,000 or 4,000 feet. The next moment the eddy swept us into the main current of the fall, and though the Te Anan was a vessel of some 1,500 tons harden, she was instantly spun round and drifted out of the sacred spot."
Mount Cook himself produced nothing so splendid as this. Indeed, the main interest of the struggle with him consists in the preliminary difficulties the party had to undergo. They were nearly drowned in the Hooker and Tasman rivers, before they could get on to the lower slopes of the mountain. They formed five different camps, having to go over the same ground two or three times a day, so as to carry up the requisite stores. They tried three different routes, before they could hit on the right one. When at length they found the only possible track, they were overtaken by storm before they could get within sight of the final plateau. Having started at six a.m., at eleven a.m. they had to leave their provisions behind. At six p.m., when they reached the top ridge, which had promised to lead them to the summit, they came to a break in the cornice of snow. "A bergschrund broke through it. There was no open crevasse, but a step down off the cornice of five or six feet, a jut, and then a step up of eight feet," and wind and rain blowing harder than ever. They then exercised a wise dis- cretion, which nothing but the thought that it was their last chance ought to have prevented them from exercising earlier, and they turned back, leaving the actual crown of the monarch undesecrated by the hand or foot of man. But coming down was, as usual, worse than going up, and ended in their spending the night standing, as depicted in the frontispiece, "on a little ledge less than two feet wide and sloping outwards, so that we had to hold on with our hands," 10,000 feet above the sea and 5,000 feet above the line of perpetual snow, without food, wet through, and having to go on stamping with their feet all night to prevent being overtaken by the sleep of death. The night, however, passed, and at half-past eight next morning, narrowly escaping an avalanche, they got back to food, having fasted for twenty-two hours. At half-past seven in the next evening they reached their camp, and their "long expedition of sixty-two hours was over." There is nothing in the history of Alpine climbing to compare with this awful ex- perience. We should have to go to Arctic voyages to find its parallel in endurance amid ice and snow, but the additional horror of imminent danger in holding on to a rock above a precipice all night, puts it even beyond the most thrilling tales of Arctic adventures. The names of Mr. Green and his com- panions ought to take rank in New-Zealand story only second to those of Tasman and Cook.
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