It is not easy to put down in words what were our thoughts on our homeward journey from the Mimika River to Plymouth Sound. Naturally enough there were feelings of pleasant anticipation in returning to the comforts of civilised life, and there were feelings of profound thankfulness that we had left behind us neither our bones nor our health, as too many others less fortunate had done. There was also a sense of (I think pardonable) satisfaction at having accomplished something; the surveyors had made an accurate map of a large tract of quite unknown country; the naturalists had made valuable collections of birds and animals, and some most interesting races of men had been visited and studied.
But beneath these was another feeling of vague disappointment. We had set out full of hope, if not of confidence, of reaching the Snow Mountains, and the disappointment of not having set foot on them was aggravated by the fact that we had been so long in sight of them. It was exasperating beyond words to see the mountains month after month only forty miles away and not to be able to move a foot in their direction; to study them so that we came to know the changing patches of lower snow and almost the very crevasses in the glaciers, and still to be forced to be content with looking and longing for “the hills and the snow upon the hills.”
To look for fifteen months at that great rock precipice, and those long fields of snow untrodden yet by foot of man, to anticipate the delight of attaining to the summits and to wonder what would be seen beyond them on the other side, those were pleasures that kept one’s hopes alive through long periods of dull inaction. The aching disappointment of turning back and leaving the mountains as remote and as mysterious as they were before words of mine cannot express; but happily there is always comfort to be found in the reflexion that
“Some falls are means the happier to arise.”
APPENDIX A
NOTES ON THE BIRDS COLLECTED; BY THE B.O.U. EXPEDITION TO DUTCH NEW GUINEA
By W. R. OGILVIE-GRANT
Our knowledge of the Birds of New Guinea is based mainly on Count T. Salvadori’s monumental work Ornitologia della Papuasia e delle Molluche, which appeared in three large volumes in 1880-82, and on his Aggiunte to the above work published in three parts in 1887-89. Since that date our knowledge of the avi-fauna has vastly increased and a very large number of splendid Birds-of-Paradise and other remarkable new species have been discovered.