Page:Du Faur - The Conquest of Mount Cook.djvu/274

at the Hermitage or the bivouac; it rusted and the lens remained open the whole time. A roll of twenty blank films returned to me by the man who does all my photographic work caused me much grief. Impetuously I planned with Peter Graham to go back at any rate as far as the middle peak, and take the photos again. I could not bear the thought of having so little to show of our greatest climb. The guides too were woefully disappointed at the failure and quite willing to make another expedition. Somewhat comforted by this arrangement, we settled down again to wait for the weather. This remained more than usually bad. For sixteen days we never saw the sun; the first fourteen it rained steadily day and night, but the last forty-eight hours it came down in solid sheets, each drop seemed to contain about a bucketful. After twelve hours of this the hotel manager rushed to Graham, with whom I happened to be talking, to say the Muller River was coming down Kea Point. We frankly didn't believe him, but of course went to see what was the matter. When we reached the front of the hotel we beheld a yellow flood coming straight for us, sweeping everything before it—shrubs, uprooted trees, boulders, and ice were churned about in its raging waters. Fortunately for the writer and the rest of the inmates of the hotel, it received a check at the front gate; here the stream divided in two, one rushing down the road towards Pukaki, and the smaller one making for the Hermitage. A few yards from the front door is a small pond (dignified by the name of a lake) with an isle covered in willow-trees in the middle. The on-coming stream flooded this, and soon the front of the building was surrounded by water. However, no one seemed particularly alarmed. In fact, we all took it as a pleasant excitement after our two weeks' deadly dullness. There were various excitements: two calves were stranded on an island at the side of the house, their ropes twisted round them, and a raging torrent between them and the