As Mr. Malcolm Ross, one of the adventurous band, has pointed out with legitimate pride, their experience was gained and their work done without a single fatal accident--a happy record, all the more striking by contrast with the heavy toll of life levied by the rivers of our mountain territory. The company of climbers, therefore, must have joined intelligence to resolution, for, up to the present, they have broken nothing but records. Mr. Mannering, one of the earliest of them, attacked Aorangi five times within five years. After being thwarted by such accidents as rain-storms, the illness of a companion, and--most irritating of all--the dropping of a “swag” holding necessaries, he, with his friend Mr. Dixon, at last attained to the ice-cap in December 1890. Their final climb was a signal exhibition of courage and endurance. They left their bivouac (7480 feet in air) at four o’clock in the morning, and, after nine hours of plodding upward in soft snow had to begin the labour of cutting ice-steps. In the morning they were roasted by the glaring sun; in the shade of the afternoon their rope and coats were frozen stiff, and the skin from their hands stuck to the steel of their ice-axes. Dixon, a thirteen-stone man, fell through a snow-wreath, and was only saved by a supreme effort. Pelted by falling ice the two amateurs cut their way onward, and at half-past five in the evening found themselves unscathed and only about a hundred feet below the point gained by Mr. Green and his Swiss. They made an effort to hew steps up to the apex of the ice-cap, but time was too short and the wind was freshening; as it was they had to work their way down by lantern light. Now they had to creep backwards, now to clean out the steps cut in the daylight; now their way was lost, again they found it, and discovered that some gulf had grown wider. They did not regain their bivouac till nearly three in the morning after twenty-three hours of strain to body and mind.[4] [4] For Mr. Mannering’s narrative see _With Axe and Rope in the New Zealand Alps_, London, 1891. [Illustration: MOUNT SEFTON]