The point of return.
NIC LOW’S NEW BOOK UPRISING IS THE ACCOUNT OF NINE EXPEDITIONS INTO THE NGĀI TAHU HISTORY OF KĀ TIRITIRI-O-TE-MOANA, NEW ZEALAND’S SOUTHERN ALPS. GUIDED BY ORAL HISTORIES, NIC TRAVELLED ON SKIS, ON FOOT AND BY WATER TO REVISIT THE STORIES OF HIS ANCESTORS.
In this excerpt, he visits Aoraki / Mt Cook, “an ancestor to bow your head to, a peak to climb.”
•
Midnight came too soon. Alarms cut us from sleep. We rolled from our bunks straight into our boots, and drank brutal coffee by head torch, with adrenaline fizzing in our guts. Half an hour after opening our eyes, the four of us stood ready outside Plateau Hut beneath a wild blaze of stars.
South towards the pole a vast emptiness blotted the Milky Way. I looked up at that pyramid of darkness, blacker than night, and quietly greeted the mountain. Two shooting stars, one after the other, zipped towards the horizon, only to be extinguished by its bulk. Aoraki was a mass of rock and ice; an ancestor, and a god.
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‘Guys, can we take a moment?’ I asked, feeling a little self-conscious: mountaineers aren’t a particularly spiritual lot.
The others gathered round and switched off their lights. There was an old Ngāi Tahu chant about Aoraki that I wanted to share, with them and with the mountain. In Māori I told Aoraki who we were and why we’d come. Then the old chant rang softly in the emptiness of the Grand Plateau.
Nā te aoKo te ao tūroaTāna ko te ao mārama…
The chant comes from Matiaha Tiramōrehu, the chief who wrote the 1849 letter of protest to Lieutenant- Governor Eyre that began Te Kerēme, and it contains our creation story. It begins in pure blackness, with the many voids, with a womb of darkness. From the voids emerges Mākū (moisture), who couples with the long, unbroken horizon to give birth to Raki, the Sky Father. Raki couples with his first wife, Poko- hārua-te-pō, who is the breath of life from the womb of darkness. She gives birth to Aoraki.
So the highest peak in New Zealand is the firstborn son of the sky. Life and weather and land flow from his shoulders. He is our oldest and most sacred ancestor, and the symbol of the tribe. Over the century-and-a-half fight for justice, the return and renaming of Aoraki became central to the restoration of the tribe’s mana. Ngāi Tahu’s best known proverb says that we will bow our heads only to Aoraki. The most sacred part of Aoraki is his head. No one should stand on the head of a chief.
But on this crisp mid-December night we were setting out in the footsteps of our European forebears. They climbed Mt Cook with axe and rope, intent on planting their boots on top.
Aoraki was renamed Mt Cook after Captain James Cook, spearhead of British exploration and later colonisation in the South Pacific. The peak’s mile- long summit ridge and tremendous pyramidal form have drawn generations of climbers. From the 1880s, dozens of attempts saw parties get within a few hundred metres of the summit, only to be forced back by darkness or storms. Now, around a hundred and fifty people climb the mountain each year.
Aoraki / Mt Cook: an ancestor to bow your head to, a peak to climb. Both impulses were in my blood.
Ko Aoraki me Rakamaomao, tāna a Tāwhirimatea
Ko Tū-te-raki-whānoa
Uira ki te Mahaanui a Māui
Ko te ao takata
Tihei mauriora!
At the end of the chant, we stood focused and quiet in the dark. It was the last time we would be still for the next eighteen or so hours. The others were gunning for the climbers’ summit, a few steps short of the highest point. This is where Ngāi Tahu asks mountaineers to stop.
I wanted to attempt a different type of mountaineering. My plan was to go most of the way up, but at some point, deliberately and perhaps perversely, to turn back. I wanted to pay my respects to the ancestor, to speak aloud some of our Aoraki traditions, and also to honour my Pākehā climbing family, who love the mountain as well. I wasn’t sure where I’d force myself to turn around.
I felt the usual thrill of anticipation at setting out on a climb, and underneath it, a thin, bright shaft of fear. Since the Godley avalanche I’d become mildly paranoid in loose snow conditions on exposed ground. I wasn’t looking forward to descending the Linda Shelf. And I still didn’t know what to believe about signs and omens, and Aoraki as a centre of spiritual power. Should I be here at all? Some elders had said yes; some had said no. I wasn’t sure where I stood—or, rather, where I should stand.
The four of us nodded to each other. Time to go.
•
Eighteen of us set out from the hut that night. As we contoured around Aoraki’s lap, beyond the small lit sphere of my boots and the rope extending into gloom, all I could see were hovering lights in twos and fours. No one talked. Apart from the rhythmic crunch of crampons, there was no sound. These early starts, so close to sleep, often feel dreamlike, as if we were a caravan train crossing a desert at night.
A string of brutally hot nor’-westers, early for the season, had cracked open the crevasses on the Linda Glacier. Some were big enough to swallow a building. The previous week, descending climbers had had to jump slots after the snow bridges melted out. There was a good chance we would be back in the hut before breakfast, our climb merely a visit to gaze into a huge hole.
Smaller crevasses emerged then vanished. We increased our pace across avalanche debris off the Silberhorn arete, then turned and began to climb in zigzagging steps. We were moving fast, but all sense of space and time was gone. Somewhere far up to our right, the boom and roar of falling ice broke the stillness.
I’d come with a friend, Dan, a barrister from Sydney. Because our more experienced friends were away on other trips, with the help of Alpine Recreation we’d enlisted guides for the first time. I was sharing a rope with Lewis, a stocky Kiwi in his early thirties with sandy hair and a broad, shy grin. An intelligent adventure-seeker, he’d come south from Auckland as a young man with a degree in politics and history, and a propensity for getting involved in ‘stupid shit’. ‘If I hadn’t come to Mt Cook and become a guide,’ he joked, ‘I’d have ended up in jail.’
Lewis was also unusual among guides because he’d grown up speaking fluent Māori at a bilingual school. When we’d chatted about the significance of the mountain to Ngāi Tahu, he’d become quite still, his head half-turned away, listening intently, worry lines creasing his brow. As the only white kid in his bilingual class, he’d been bullied, so he’d had nothing to do with the culture since. But when I’d spoken Māori at the start of the climb, I could tell he’d understood much of what I’d said.
Out on the mountain, Lewis was in his element. We wound through the frozen folds of Aoraki’s cloak. Our torches flashed across seracs rearing overhead like the prows of beached ships. Huge crevasses swallowed all light. Above us, the two climbers in the lead turned around.
‘No good this way,’ one of them shouted down to us. ‘Try further west.’
We backtracked in swinging arcs to keep the rope tight. A huge crevasse forced us underneath ice cliffs off the Silberhorn arete. In the pitch dark we couldn’t see the danger, but from the tonnes of ice strewn across the glacier we knew it hung above our heads, an enormous sword of Damocles.
‘In Europe, this would not be a route,’ muttered Dan’s French guide.
There wasn’t much point in thinking about it. Better to put your head down and keep moving.
Back out in the middle of the glacier, we reached one last slot. Lewis placed an ice screw and led up a short step above a bottomless crevasse. I pulled my second tool off my pack and followed him up on front points. We were through the icefall. So far, so good.
Pausing for water, I checked my watch. Four hours had passed in the space of a breath. I clicked my light off for a moment. A landscape of raw starlight and towering black ridgelines built itself on all sides. There wasn’t a spiritual thought in my head.
•
Dawn crept on so slowly. On the rising traverse across the Linda Shelf, the light from our head torches seemed to expand until its faint glow touched the surrounding peaks. What had been indistinct, a rumour of mass, took on form and weight. Silver light brought out the soft detail of the beautiful, monstrous presences of Aoraki’s brothers. By the time we reached the ’schrund across the top of the Linda Shelf, they were blue giants pushing up into the heavens.
The climbing started in earnest, with a couple of fast, calf-burning pitches up sixty-degree snow, heading up Aoraki’s immense torso. While Lewis led, I swung round in the belay to gaze on the tattooed faces of the brothers, glowing lilac and rose. This was the moment of creation, repeated every day. A thin red slit cut the eastern horizon. I mouthed the words of the chant. The small silver cup of the moon tilted to the north.
The great ancestor’s shoulder is also known as the Summit Rocks, a sequence of buttresses at the edge of the East Face. Yesterday’s storm had plastered them with ice. The exposure was superb, and the climbing looked even better. We were approaching Aoraki’s head with every step, but there was no way I was turning back. Not yet. The rope came tight.
‘On belay!’ Lewis yelled.
My first axe went in with a solid thunk, and again my mind dissolved. I fitted my body to the corners, cracks and vertical steps in sequences dictated entirely by Aoraki himself. The ice and névé took each tool placement first go. I arrived at each belay grinning, and Lewis grinned back. There was no need to talk. One of the other guides, a powerful man named Alex, appeared over a lip below us and whooped with pleasure. Below him, the long silver ridge leading from Aoraki to Mt Tasman, New Zealand’s next-highest peak, turned to fire with the first direct rays of sun. The white sweep of the Tasman Glacier glowed with a deep inner light.
At eight, seven hours after we’d left the hut, Lewis and I reached the false summit, a small patch of flat ground above the Summit Rocks. We were the first ones there. Untracked snow swooped up to Aoraki’s head. A final ’schrund divided us from the upper ice cap. At 3,660 metres, this was the famous point of failure for climbers forced to turn back. The top was in reach.
We unroped and sat down, and I bowed my head.
NIC LOW
