During the following days, while we were stumbling back to Parimau along the now familiar track, we wondered whether we should be the last as well as being the first Europeans to penetrate into that forsaken region. It has been mapped now, and our wanderings have shown that it is not the way by which any sane person would go who wished to explore the Snow Mountains. It is a region absolutely without inhabitants, and the Papuans, who live on the upper waters of the Mimika and Kamura rivers, shun it even as a hunting ground. There are no precious metals or other products of the soil to be won, and not until all the other forests in the world are cut down will its timber be of value. So it may safely be supposed that it will long be left untouched; the Birds of Paradise will call by day, the cassowaries will boom by night, and the leeches will stretch themselves anxiously on their leaves, but it will be a long time before another white man comes to disturb them.
THE DREARY JUNGLE
Many people have the idea that a tropical forest is full of gorgeous flowers, about which brilliant butterflies are constantly flitting and birds of splendid plumage flash from tree to tree. This idea is no doubt due in a great measure to the habit of gathering together in hothouses the flowering plants of all the Tropics, though they may have come from Central America, from Africa and from Borneo or Java. It is true that there are many splendid birds, but the vegetation is so dense that you seldom, if ever, see them; the brilliant butterflies are mostly out of sight near the topmost branches of the trees; and you may travel for days together without seeing a single flowering plant. Many of the trees are covered with orchids on all their branches, but they very seldom flower, and the flowers of most of them are so insignificant that they do not attract your attention.
THE SUPPORTS OF A PANDANUS (30 FEET HIGH).
Occasionally you may see high above your head the white flower of a Dendrobium or the long spike of the gigantic Grammatophyllum, but I have only once (in a small island on the North coast of New Guinea) seen such a mass of flowering orchids as to make a splash of colour in the view. In the Tropics there is nothing comparable in colour with the blue hyacinths, the fields of buttercups, or the gorse and hawthorns of this country.
But if there is little that is beautiful in the jungle vegetation, there is a great deal that is curious and interesting. The ubiquitous Rattans, climbing Palms, are a constant source of wonder for their snake-like meanderings through the jungle until they climb to the top of some tree where they end in a bunch of leaves. We found three species of Screw Pines (Pandanus), fantastic trees on stilts, and branching like irregular candelabra. The wood of the Pandanus is very tough, and is used by the natives for making bows and spears; the long ribbon-like leaves are used for mats and the walls of their huts, and the fruits of some are eatable, but exceedingly hard. One species bears a cluster of small red fruit about the size of a banana; and another bears a huge melon-shaped fruit of a brilliant scarlet colour and weighing as much as thirty pounds and upwards.
Equally remarkable are the trees which stand propped on a number of aerial roots and seem, as Mr. Wallace noted,[25] to have started growing in mid air; where several of these trees grow together, it is difficult to say where one ends and another begins. Too rarely you come across a magnificent forest tree (usually, I believe, a species of Dammara) supported on huge buttresses, which begin twenty or more feet above the ground and spread out for many yards from the foot of the tree. We had occasion to cut down some of these trees, and found the wood intensely hard; if there were seven or eight buttresses a single one would still hold up the tree after all the rest had been cut. When the tree had been felled, the stump looked like a great starfish sprawling over the ground with a centre not more than a foot across, while the trunk a few feet up had been a yard or more in thickness.
It has happened to me to walk through many hundreds of miles of forest in different parts of the world, but I have never seen any so dreary as that New Guinea jungle with its mud, its leeches, its almost unbroken stillness, and its universal air of death. Happily the mind of man is of a curiously selective habit, and it chooses to retain only the more pleasant things; you forget the long wet weeks of rain and mud, the hunger and the nasty food, and remember rather those glorious moments when you came out of the twilit jungle into an open river bed and saw the distant mountains, or those rare sunny afternoons when the “implacable cicala” creaked in the treetops above your tent.
FUTURE TRAVELLERS