With the cold blasts coming now and again with the force of a perfect hurricane, we crawled on our hands and knees along the steeps of the lower end, and cut footsteps with our tomahawks in the snow and ice, which spread itself like a white sheet over the precipitous inclines over which we had to make our way before we could reach the base of the rocky mass. Up every yard we had to crawl with great caution, and, in order to steady ourselves, we linked ourselves together by holding on to the flag-pole, as in many places a single slip of the foot would have sent us rolling down the frozen steeps into eternity. The thrilling sensation caused by these adventures acted as a kind of stimulus, which was heightened by the fact that we knew when once on the summit of the ice-bound crown, not only the whole mountain, but the whole country would be beneath us. Cutting away the enormous icicles that impeded our progress, we climbed step by step up the treacherous, craggy sides of the towering mass of rock, but as we neared the top the gusts of wind swept round like a whirlwind on every side, so as to render it impossible at some points to approach the edge. Notwithstanding the wintry blasts, however, this day might be considered as a grand and a beautiful one for Ruapehu, but what the lofty crest of the great mountain must be like when storms break over it with terrific violence, when the wind howls from peak to peak, when the lightning leaps from crag to crag, when the thunder rolls and resounds through valley and ravine, when the snows descend, and darkening showers of hail and rain form bounding cataracts, no soul can tell. Once upon the summit of the rocky crown, a glorious sight burst upon the view--one unique in itself, and unequalled in sublimity. It was now one o'clock, and since the time we had left the base of the mountain on the previous morning it had taken us nearly twenty hours of actual climbing to reach this spot; and now we seemed to have entered a new world--a world where there was no sound but the sigh of the wind, where there was no sign of life; a world placed high in the sky, made up of golden sunshine, azure blue, and glittering snow and ice, but encircled as it were, by a broad expanse of green, bordered by the blue waves of the distant sea.