From the Malte Brun.

It is much easier now to reach that wonderful little alpine camp, the Malte Brun Hut, than it was in the days when I first visited the Mount Cook country, nearly thirty years ago. That was in the days of the old Hermitage, a dilapidated yet comfortable hostelry built by Mr. Huddlestone, down on the plain between the present fine hotel and the Hooker River. There was no bridge across the Hooker then, and we had to cross the swift and dangerous glacier river on horseback. There was a cage there, running on wire ropes, high above the river, and it was hard work hauling oneself across, so the sure-footed horses were preferable; and there was the rough ride up the side of the Tasman Glacier to the Ball Hut. Now the river is bridged, the roads are good, new huts have been built. It is an easy walk up along the Tasman Glacier to the Malte Brun Range; no easier and more wonderful ice traverse in New Zealand. The picture from the snag little terrace on which the hut stands is more than enough to compensate for the trouble of reaching the place.

What a look-out it is there, nearly six thousand feet above the sea and five hundred feet above the level glacier, early in the day before the haze dims the bright glories of the dividing range. The great king peaks of the New Zealand Alps are all there before you, a bare two miles away, across the ice-floored valley, peaks page 22 page 23 ten thousand to twelve thousand feet, lifting from enormous bases of black rock, seamed with snowfields, glittering with glaciers. Up and up they soar, into heights sharp-etched in white fire against the stainless blue. Dazzling—it is more than dazzling—it burns on your eyes; you had best put on your snow-glasses.

Those pinnacles of fire, those minarets of Tasman and De la Beche and their fellow rangatiras of the Alp world, how they throw back with redoubled radiance the strong light of morning!—how grandly their ice-mailed shoulders stand up, glacier-armoured through the ages, seemingly for ever defended against man's assault by their circumvallation of crevasses and bergschrunds, their knife-sharp aretes, their streams of avalanches. The marvel is that so many men—and women too—of clear heads and stout and limber muscles and strong lungs, have been found to scale those heaven-high shining walls.