Mr. Green, as he looked out from a half-way halting-place on the ascent of Aorangi, and took in the succession of crowded, shining crests and peaks surging up to the north and north-east of him, felt the Alpine-climber’s spirit glow within him. Here was a wealth of peaks awaiting conquest; here was adventure enough for the hands and feet of a whole generation of mountaineers. Scarcely one of the heights had then been scaled. This is not so now. Peak after peak of the Southern Alps has fallen to European or Colonial enterprise, and the ambitious visitor to the Mount Cook region, in particular, will have some trouble to find much that remains virgin and yet accessible. For the unambitious, on the other hand, everything has been made easy. The Government and its tourist department has taken the district in hand almost as thoroughly as at Roto-rua, and the holiday-maker may count on being housed, fed, driven about, guided, and protected efficiently and at a reasonable price. Happily, too, nothing staring or vulgar defaces the landscape. Nor do tourists, yet, throng the valleys in those insufferable crowds that spoil so much romance in Switzerland and Italy. Were they more numerous than they are, the scale of the ranges and glaciers is too large to allow the vantage-spots to be mobbed. Take the glaciers: take those that wind along the flanks of the Mount Cook range on its eastern and western sides, and, converging to the south, are drained by the river Tasman. The Tasman glacier itself is eighteen miles long; its greatest width is over two miles; its average width over a mile. The Murchison glacier, which joins the Tasman below the glacier ice, is more than ten miles long. And to the west and south-west of the range aforesaid, the Hooker and Mueller glaciers are on a scale not much less striking. The number of tributary glaciers that feed these enormous ice-serpents has not, I fancy, been closely estimated, but from heights lofty enough to overlook most of the glacier system that veins the Aorangi region, explorers have counted over fifty seen from one spot. Perhaps the finest sight in the alpine country--at any rate to those who do not scale peaks--is the Hochstetter ice-fall. This frozen cataract comes down from a great snow plateau, some 9000 feet above the sea, to the east of Aorangi. The fall descends, perhaps, 4000 feet to the Tasman glacier. It is much more than a mile in breadth, and has the appearance of tumbling water, storm-beaten, broken, confused, surging round rocks. It has, indeed, something more than the mere appearance of wild unrest, for water pours through its clefts, and cubes and toppling pinnacles of ice break away and crash as they fall from hour to hour. [Illustration: THE CECIL AND WALTER PEAKS]