"Now hunger fights for us."
For the Ngatitoa there was no food. Their food was all in the "pah"
from which they had been driven. Weary with fighting, spent with
hunger, the warriors yet manned the stockade. With them stood also
the women. There was no thought of surrender. Well they knew what to
expect--torture and death for the men, insult and slavery for the women.
* * * * *
Three days had passed--for the Ngatitoa, days of misery and want; for
the enemy, of feasting and merriment. Many of the warriors died, hunger
gnawing at their hearts. Scarcely a dozen remained capable of bearing
arms. The women and children had taken refuge in the cave. With them
was Heruini. One by one they died in the dark, as famine slew them. Now
three yet lived; now two; next, Heruini was alone among the dead.
The air amid the corpses was dank and fetid. Affrighted at the presence
of the dead, the girl crept to the mouth of the cavern. Weak and
fainting, she leant against the wall of rock.
That night came the final assault. Ere it was delivered Taurau, seeing
that all was lost, bade his men make good the defence to the utmost,
and climbed the path toward the cavern. If, haply, Heruini were alive,
he would take her by a secret though perilous path that he knew, and,
entering the bush, make a bid for safety by flight.
Cautiously, warily, he made his way upward, keeping ever in the shadow.
As his foot touched the edge of the shelf, Heruini, dazed with hunger,
half blind with misery, thinking him one of the hated foemen come to
take her, flung out her arms and thrust with all her might.
[Illustration: "TOTTERING AN INSTANT, CLUTCHING AT EMPTY AIR, EVEN AS
HE FELL TAURAU CALLED HER NAME."]
The blow, though feeble, was yet enough on that dizzy verge. Tottering
an instant, clutching at empty air, even as he fell Taurau called her
name. The moon broke through the flying scud. She saw his face for an
instant, and then it was gone. The Ngatahi, rushing up to seize her,
heard a cry, "Aie-e-e, Taurau!" They beheld her stand a moment on the
brink, and, with a second cry, leap out into the dark. The bones of the
women and children remain yet in the cavern. Therefore the place is
"tapu."[3]
[3] "Tapu"--sacred, accursed.
The fish swim, uncaught, under the cliff; No fisherman's line plumbs
the deep water that covers the bones of the lovers. Once in every moon
the spirit of Heruini returns to wail for the lover whom she slew. For
one hour she sits in the weed-grown cavern beneath the cliff, and sends
her cry across the waters. Men, hearing the voice, called the place
'Tangiwahine (the place of a woman's wailing). Even so it is named to
this day.
Mountaineering by Telescope.
+By Harold J. Shepstone.+
An interesting account of the giant telescopes which have been
erected on the Swiss mountains. They are very popular among
visitors, who are enabled to watch climbers ascending difficult
peaks, and in this way many accidents have been detected, the
prompt dispatch of rescue-parties saving scores of lives. The
instruments are so powerful that on clear days it is possible
to see a distance of a hundred miles, and persons forty miles
away appear almost within hailing distance!
A new attraction has been added to the long list which Switzerland
offers in the form of the powerful observing telescopes which have
been erected all over the country. You find them everywhere--in the
grounds of the leading hotels, at the various railway stations, and at
almost every point from which a panoramic view of the mountains can be
obtained. There is one on the Jungfrau, for instance, which stands at
an altitude of just over ten thousand feet above sea-level, and there
are many others at elevations varying from five to seven thousand feet.
They are rendered conspicuous by their construction and size, and are
of an efficiency which, aided by the atmospherical conditions in the
mountains, almost dumbfounds the tourist from more murky regions, for
it is wellnigh incredible what one can see through these giant glasses.
[Illustration: THE TELESCOPE AT THE RIFFELALP.
_From a Photograph._]
It is only during the last few seasons that these telescopes have been
erected to any extent, but the innovation has deservedly "caught on."
Few of us have time or the physical strength to ascend the highest
peaks in the Alps, but we can now do our mountaineering by means of the
great telescopes, a peep through which brings the solitary and almost
inaccessible regions of ice and snow to our very feet. The instruments
produce a wonderful stereoscopic effect, everything standing out boldly
and clearly, and appearing to be only a few yards away. There, right
in front of us, looms forth in solitary grandeur some bleak and lofty
summit which only the feet of the most experienced Alpinists have ever
trod. Below are the gullies, so treacherous to the climber, and to the
right and left great ridges which can only be safely crossed by the
exercise of the greatest skill. Here and there are mighty crevasses and
great glaciers. Without the slightest exertion on our part the whole
beauty and grandeur of the mountain is placed before our eyes.
The telescopes fulfil other useful purposes besides gratifying the
sightseer. If we have friends making some dangerous or difficult
ascent, we can turn the glass upon them and watch their progress step
by step. Every famous ascent nowadays is invariably watched through
telescopes in this way. If the climbers are forty, or even sixty,
miles away they can be detected and their movements followed almost as
easily as though they were within hailing distance. This watching of
climbers is one of the favourite pastimes of visitors. You can see them
cutting steps in the ice when negotiating some difficult ridge, watch
them paying out rope as they skirt along the edge of some dangerous
crevasse, and, in a word, share the pleasure and excitement of their
trip.
[Illustration: "SHE FOUND HERSELF SHOOTING DOWN TOWARDS THE EDGE."]
The telescopes, too, have often been the means of saving life. When
Alpinists are in serious difficulty, the guides at once make signals,
and a relief party is promptly sent to their aid. The signal is the
repetition of a sound, the wave of a flag, or the flash of a lantern
at regular intervals, at the rate of six signals a minute, followed
by a pause of a minute, with a continuation every alternate minute.
Observers using the telescopes have often detected these signals
before anyone else and given the alarm, when aid has at once been
dispatched to those in distress. Sometimes, too, telescope-watchers
have discovered climbers in difficulty, and have sent someone to their
help. Were it not for the instruments, in fact, many men and women
who have ventured far without guides would have perished. Only the
other week a lady tourist, who had gone up the mountain alone, had a
narrow escape from death, and probably owes her life to the fact that a
guide happened to be idly watching her through one of the telescopes.
In endeavouring to take a short cut down to the hotel she missed her
footing, and in an instant found herself shooting down towards the edge
of a sheer drop of a hundred and fifty feet. By the merest chance she
was thrown into the branches of a pine tree some twenty feet over the
edge, and there she hung, unable to move. The horrified observer at
once left the telescope and informed the hotel proprietor, and in just
under the hour four guides with ropes had reached the spot and rescued
her. She was comparatively uninjured, but almost dead with fright.
One might be inclined to think that with the numerous mountain railways
that have penetrated into the very heart of the Alps during the last
few years, the big observation telescope was really a superfluous
luxury. As a matter of fact, however, the railways have rendered the
telescope more necessary than ever. Indeed, the railway authorities
do not consider their equipment complete unless at the very summit of
their line they erect one of these giant instruments. These wonderful
railways--monuments of engineering skill though they be--only land
one several thousand feet below the actual summit. The view here, of
course, is grand, but the snow-covered peak, the almost untrodden
summit--the very thing the ordinary individual most wishes to see--is
almost undiscernible to the naked eye. But with the telescope it is
different. The summit comes right into the field of vision in an
instant, grand and majestic, standing out boldly and clearly, appearing
to be only a few yards away. Then the glass can be turned upon the
whole surface of the mountain, and in this way one learns more about
the formation of the rocks and glaciers and steep ridges than he would
do by weeks of arduous climbing among them.
A word or two about the telescopes themselves will be appropriate here,
for they are no ordinary instruments. The one at Nürren is valued at a
hundred and twenty pounds. It is a double instrument, and two persons
can look through it at the same time. The other instruments depicted
in the various photographs are valued at from sixty-five to ninety
pounds apiece. They were made by the famous optical firm of Carl Zeiss,
of Jena, and represent the last word in telescope construction. Not
all the telescopes through which visitors may peep for a small fee on
the mountains of Switzerland were supplied by this firm, though there
are certainly a large number of them. They are to be found on the
Riffelalp, above Zermatt; on the Schynige Platte, near Interlaken; on
the Rigi, the Weissenstein, near Solothurn; the Wengern-Alp, on the
Jungfrau Railway; at Berne, Grindelwald, and other places.
[Illustration: THE FIVE-INCH TELESCOPE AT NÜRREN.
_From a Photograph._]
Without going into technicalities, it may be added that the instruments
are fitted with the new Jena glass, which is perfectly transparent,
and, therefore, gives a clear image. In cutting and polishing the
glasses every care was taken to eliminate chromatic aberrations, this
being of great importance for landscape observations, the image being
thus freed from the distracting coloured borders with which every user
of ordinary glasses is familiar. The instruments may be roughly divided
into two classes: monocular and binocular (_i.e._, those through which
the observation is made with one eye only, and those through which
it is made with two). The former are mostly fitted with a revolving
appliance, the turning of which allows of a rapid change of magnifying
power. The object glasses in these instruments vary from four inches
to five inches in diameter. The four-inch instrument magnifies objects
thirty-five, fifty-three, and seventy-three times, according to the
turning of the wheel, and the five-inch glass instrument thirty-five,
fifty-eight, and a hundred and sixteen times.
The binocular instruments are contrivances astonishing in their effect.
It is well known that our power of perspective rapidly decreases as
the distance from the object increases. The reason of this is that
the facial angle at which objects appear decreases with the distance,
and finally becomes so slight that we lose all power of estimating
it. We can, however, enlarge this angle by approaching the object, or
by bringing it apparently near to us. This is accomplished in these
five-foot telescopes by the employment of an artificial medium, so that
separate objects in a landscape view twenty miles distant--houses,
trees, people, etc.--appear as if they were only eighteen yards away.
The effect is wonderful and charming. Mountain peaks and wooded
valleys, which when seen through an ordinary telescope are all
apparently on the same plane, stand out sharp, clear, and in glowing
natural colours.
There is a telescope on the Uetliberg, close to Zürich, through which
on a clear day it is possible to detect the stone signal on one of the
peaks of the Diablerets, near Lausanne, almost at the other end of
Switzerland, being a distance of not less than ninety-six miles. This
signal is only about four feet high. Climbers on the Titlis, forty
miles distant, can easily be seen through this telescope, as well as
the hotel on the Faulhorn, sixty miles distant, and, in very fine
weather, the small trigonometrical signal itself. From the instrument
on the Rigi the crevasses in all parts of the Alpine chain, and
also one of the church clocks in Schaffhausen, may be plainly seen.
From the observation station on the Riffelalp the movements of the
Matterhorn climbers can be followed as clearly as if they were within
hailing distance. Through the telescope on the Schynige Platte in the
Bernese Oberland the timid and unapproachable chamois may be observed
on precipices miles distant, and persons on the four-miles-distant
Faulhorn are easily distinguishable.
[Illustration: "THEY WERE ALMOST BURIED IN SNOW AND DOING THEIR UTMOST
TO STRUGGLE THROUGH IT."]
When it is remembered that there were seventy five fatalities in
the Alps last year, and three hundred and fifty more or less grave
accidents to climbers, it will be seen that observation of the
movements of persons upon the mountains through the telescopes fulfils
a useful purpose. There is no doubt that Mr. Turner, a well-known
English Alpinist, owes his life to-day to the fact that he was watched
in this way during his attempt to cross the Col Bonder-Krinden (seven
thousand two hundred feet high) last season. He was accompanied by a
guide named Amschwand. An observer at a telescope watched their ascent
and followed them step by step, until a blinding snowstorm arose. They
were then lost to view for several minutes, when suddenly they were
detected apparently almost buried in snow and doing their utmost to
struggle through it. The observer gave the alarm and, it being then
late in the afternoon, it was decided to send a search-party out on
the following morning at sunrise. Meanwhile the couple on the mountain
realized that their only hope of life was to reach a hut on the pass,
and they heroically struggled on through six feet of snow. They arrived
at the hut exhausted and without food, for they had brought none,
as the Col, under ordinary conditions, is easy to climb. The snow
penetrated into the hut and the unfortunate pair were literally buried
beneath it. Next morning ten guides left Adelboden to search for them,
solely because their distress had been noticed through the telescope.
The rescuers, however, were driven back by avalanches, several of
them being injured. A second search-party was finally got together,
and they succeeded, after great hardships and at no little risk, in
digging their way to the hut, where they found Mr. Turner and his guide
starving, frost-bitten, and in the last stage of exhaustion. They had
been imprisoned in the hut for forty-eight hours. After administering
restoratives the rescuers carried the couple to Adelboden.
Last season thirteen persons lost their lives in the Alps while
attempting to gather edelweiss and other mountain flowers. There is
no doubt the number would have been greater were it not for the part
played by the telescopes. Two young English ladies staying at Zermatt
decided to collect some edelweiss and take it back to London with them.
They learned that the flowers could be obtained within four hours'
journey up the mountain, and one bright morning started off in the
highest spirits. Everything went well until late in the afternoon, when
they were returning with their prize, much pleased with themselves as
the result of their adventure. If they had followed the same path as
that which they had taken, all would no doubt have been well; but,
believing they could make the journey shorter, they descended by a
different route and came to grief. Suddenly they found their way
blocked, and decided to negotiate a short but dangerous ridge. In doing
this one of them fell a distance of some twenty feet, fortunately into
fairly soft snow, but the weight of the lady's body broke her ankle,
and there she lay, unable to move. With the greatest difficulty her
companion got down to her and remained by her side. Then a snowstorm
came on, descended, and blotted them from view. This accident was
witnessed through a telescope by a boy, who had sense enough to give
the alarm, and two guides were at once dispatched to escort the ladies
down the mountain. They soon found them, but it was clear that if
the rescuers had not arrived when they did the two girls might have
fared very badly. They had completely lost their nerve, and were found
huddled together in the snow, crying hysterically.
[Illustration: THE GIANT TELESCOPE AT SCHYNIGE PLATTE, NEAR INTERLAKEN.
_From a Photograph._]
Few mountains look more absolutely inaccessible than the mighty
Matterhorn, standing up at the head of the Zermatt Valley like a
prodigious obelisk, some fifteen thousand feet in height. The first
impression one gets on viewing the mountain is that one could no more
climb it than he could scale Cleopatra's Needle. Naturally, therefore,
it is the peak that attracts the attention of the more daring climbers,
and watchers using the telescopes that are trained upon this mountain
are frequently afforded wonderful glimpses of what it means to ascend
its steep sides and cut one's way step by step up its ice-covered
slopes. Some nasty accidents, too, have been witnessed through the
glasses which command this famous mountain--hapless climbers have been
seen to miss their footing and hurtle downwards for hundreds of feet
until lost to view in some abyss. It is then that search-parties are
at once organized, and for hours their movements in turn are eagerly
watched through the telescopes. Then comes the pitiable sight of the
return of the rescuers, dragging the dead bodies over the ice behind
them. Fortunately, such incidents as these are rare, and to the
ordinary visitor the mountain telescopes of Switzerland are appreciated
for the wonderful scenery they reveal and the opportunities they afford
of doing one's mountaineering by deputy.
[Illustration]
[Illustration: