On the second day we camped on a sort of shelf on the hillside, two or three hundred feet above the river, and as our progress up the valley had been so slow, it was certain that we should not be able to reach the summit ridge before we were obliged to turn back by lack of food. So it was decided to go straight up the spur on which we then were in the hope that from the top we might see a view of the surrounding country. On the following day we climbed up about two thousand feet; the hillside was exceedingly steep, and the men had to haul themselves up by the roots of the trees above them.
LACK OF WATER
At our camp on the hillside—there was not a square yard of level ground—we were troubled for the first time in New Guinea by a lack of water. No rain had fallen for two days, and the ground was so steep that all the water had run off, and it was a long time before the Gurkhas found a trickle of water in a gully some distance away, whence a supply was laboriously fetched to the camp.
On the fourth day we climbed up about two thousand feet further, but with a great deal more difficulty. The trees became smaller as we went up, but infinitely denser, and for a great part of the way we scrambled up, not along the ground, but over a fantastic network of roots and trunks of dead and living trees, all of them covered with mosses and festooned with a wonderful variety of creepers. In some places we were clambering over the topmost branches of the tangle of vegetation, and in others we were burrowing into mossy caves and grottoes among the roots. It was a weird and rather uncanny place and, except that it lacked the beauty of colour that is found there, it recalled the forest at ten thousand feet in Ruwenzori more than any other place I have seen.
At 5,000 feet we found ourselves on the ridge, a narrow knife-edged spur of Mount Godman, and there we camped. It was a most unlikely looking spot for a camp, but the ridge beyond was a great deal worse—it took the Gurkhas many hours to cut the narrowest track along it for half a mile—so we had to make the best of the place that we had reached. A number of trees were cut down and the irregularities of the ground were more or less filled up with the branches, and there we pitched our tents and spread our beds. There was a small shrub (a species of Erica, I think), which, when burnt, filled the air with a delicious smell of incense, strangely out of keeping with our surroundings.
Though we had been surrounded by dense clouds since we reached the ridge, it obstinately refused to rain for the third day in succession, a thing quite unprecedented in our experience of the country. Happily the mosses, which clothed everything, were full of moisture and we had only to squeeze them like sponges to get water in plenty; the coolies of course complained of the dirty colour of their rice when it was cooked in mossy water, but we found that it gave to ours an unfamiliar and not unpleasant taste.
LOOKING WESTWARDS FROM ABOVE THE IWAKA RIVER.
THE COCKSCOMB MOUNTAIN (10,050 FT.) SEEN FROM MOUNT GODMAN.