Aorangi, with its 12,349 feet, exceeds the peak of Teneriffe by 159 feet. It is the highest point in our islands, for Mount Tasman, its neighbour, which comes second, fails to equal it by 874 feet. Only two or three other summits surpass 11,000 feet, and the number which attain to anything over 10,000 is not great. From the south-west, Aorangi, with the ridge attached to it, resembles the high-pitched roof of a Gothic church with a broad, massive spire standing up from the northern end. When, under strong sunlight, the ice glitters on the steep crags, and the snow-fields, unearthly in their purity, contrast with the green tint of the crawling glaciers, the great mountain is a spectacle worthy of its fame. Yet high and shapely as it is, and worthy of its name, Cloud-in-the-Heavens, it is not the most beautiful mountain in the islands. That honour may be claimed by Egmont, just as Tongariro may demand precedence as the venerated centre of Maori reverence and legend. Nor, formidable as Aorangi looks, is it, I should imagine, as impracticable as one or two summits farther south, notably Mount Balloon. However, unlike Kosciusko in Australia, it is a truly imposing height, and worthy of its premier place. With it the story of New Zealand alpine-climbing has been bound up for a quarter of a century, and such romance as that story has to show is chiefly found in attempts, successful and unsuccessful, to reach the topmost point of Aorangi. Canterbury had been settled for thirty-two years before the first of these was made. For the low snow-line, great cliffs, and enormous glaciers of the Southern Alps have their especial cause of origin. They bespeak an extraordinary steepness in the rock faces, and a boisterous climate with rapid and baffling changes of temperature. Not a climber or explorer amongst them but has been beaten back at times by tempests, or held a prisoner for many hours, listening through a sleepless night to the howling of north-west or south-west wind--lucky if he is not drenched to the skin by rain or flood. As for the temperature, an observer once noted a fall of fifty-three degrees in a few hours. On the snow-fields the hot sun blisters the skin of your face and neck, and even at a lower level makes a heavy coat an intolerable burden; but the same coat--flung impatiently on the ground and left there--may be picked up next morning frozen as stiff as a board. These extremes of heat and cold, these sudden and furious gales, are partly, I imagine, the cause of the loose and rotten state of much of the rock-surface, of the incessant falls of stones, ice-blocks, and snow, and of the number and size of the avalanches. At any rate, the higher alps showed a front which, to ordinary dwellers on our plains, seemed terrific, and which even gave pause to mountain-climbers of some Swiss experience. So even von Haast’s book did not do much more than increase the number of visitors to the more accessible glaciers and sub-alpine valleys.