Head-hunters, black, white, and brown

by Alfred C. Haddon

In course of time we entered a more hilly country, and it was in places very rough on the horses, as there were steep gullies down which they cautiously picked their way, and up which they clambered like cats. On the plains there was a single track, but a road had been cut out of the side of the hills, or a broad avenue cleared through the dense jungle. Most of the country was sparsely wooded with a clothing of rank, coarse grass and had a very Australian aspect, as the trees were mostly eucalyptus, bastard gums, and a tree that looked like the Australian spotted gum, but with rather smaller leaves. An occasional wallaby hopping in the grass and small flocks of white cockatoos that screeched as they flew, gave a further Australian colour to the scene.

The ranges of mountains and hills in this part of New Guinea run as a rule in a north-west south-east direction—that is, roughly, parallel with the coast-line; geographically speaking, they are well-dissected, folded mountain chains. All are more or less wooded right up to their summits. As we were going obliquely across the trend of the hills we naturally had a lot of uphill and down-dale travelling, though the track took advantage of all available lateral spurs.

After the coast hills had been passed we saw looming in front of us the precipitous Astrolabe Range, rising abruptly from hilly ground and forming a huge rampart stretching away to the south-east, occasional peaks rising higher than the general level of the fairly uniform edge. On the flanks of this range, and indeed all the way up as far as the summit, were masses of volcanic breccia, which stood out black and sinister from the grass, some of the blocks being of enormous size. I was greatly exercised in my mind whether these blocks had weathered out in situ like the Devonshire tors and the granitic blocks one sees on the sides of the Dartmoor hills. This may be the case in some instances, but I noticed many blocks with distinct stratification, the plane of which was vertical or nearly so; these must either have been ejected fragments or boulders that had rolled down from some greater height, but the latter was by no means obvious, and I could not satisfy myself from whence they could have fallen. The breccia was remarkably coarse; the finest planes were about as rubbly as the coarsest volcanic ash of the Murray Islands. My impression was that there has been an enormous amount of weathering, and that it requires a combination of geological knowledge and imagination, which I do not possess, to reconstruct the physical features of the district at the time of the volcanic outburst. In any case a rapid horse-ride through a wooded country is not favourable for geological observations.

On the whole there is great uniformity in the vegetation; it is only in the occasional patches of dense scrub or in the gullies that there is much variation from the pendant, sad, greyish-green leaves of the eucalyptus. But in these exceptions it was a little relief to see nature freeing herself, so to speak, from the trammels of the Australian flora, and running riot on her own account. From the tangled undergrowth rose the tall tree stems, up which ran creepers, more particularly a climbing polypod, which had some resemblance to the foliage of ratan; swaying from the branches were festoons of creepers and aerial roots. One then felt that one was really in the tropics, though the forest trees were small compared with the giants of the Amazonian forests that Wallace, Bates, and other travellers describe, and such as we were destined to see later on in Borneo. Along the watercourses were clumps of bamboo. At home one always associates palm trees with tropical scenery, here they are conspicuously absent.

The last part of the ascent of Mount Warirata was very trying to some of us, as we had to drag our tired horses up a very steep, stony, zigzag road in the blazing vertical sun. The great rocks that walled the road in many places faced the sun, and instead of giving us the comfort of their shadows in the weary land they radiated superfluous heat to our further discomfort. We were immensely relieved when we reached the top of the north-easterly extremity of the Astrolabe Range, and then at a height of 2,615 feet we were in a better position to enjoy the magnificent panorama before us. Behind us, hidden by clouds, lay the main range of mountains that forms the backbone of the south-easterly portion of New Guinea. Below us was a gorgonised sea of land, ridges of sharp-crested hills running mainly in one direction, like the arrested rollers of a Titanic ocean. Rising like islands to the north-west from the general level of the lower hills were two conspicuous masses, “Fanny Peak” and “Saddle-Back.” To the south-west lay the sea, and the coast-line was contoured as if on a map, the complex Bootless Inlet was the nearest portion of the coast, and the variable extent of the fringing reef off the headlands showed pale green against the blue of the sea. From this height Bootless Inlet and Port Moresby have the appearance of “drowned” bays, that is, of depressions of the coast which have permitted the sea to cover what would otherwise be fertile valleys. Around us were the same eucalyptus and cycads we had seen all day, but added to them were equally characteristic bottle-brush trees (banksias) of more than one species and a pink-flowered melastoma. A “cypress pine” gave the only mountainous touch to the vegetation.

With antipodean earthly scenery we had the sky of a glorious English summer, a clear deep blue, with massive fleecy cumulus clouds, whose brightness was contrasted with dark shadows. At the coast-level the sky is usually a greyer blue, often lavender coloured, owing to the moisture in the air which acts as a screen and lowers the blue tone of the sky. A haze pervaded the lower landscape, owing to the vapour-laden south-east breeze and the widely drifting smoke of numerous bush fires made by natives who were clearing the scrub for their gardens. This haze gave a softness to the view, and painted the shades with various shades of blue, but a little less “atmosphere” would, on the whole, have been better from a topographical point of view.

The purity of the air may be judged from the fact that Ballantine produced from under the shelter of a big rock a tin of fresh butter, which he had placed there six or seven weeks previously, and it was as sweet as when he cached it. The butter was actually fresh butter that he had put in a cocoa tin, and not an unopened tin of butter. This was at a height of about one thousand seven hundred feet, and the air was evidently practically free from putrefactive microbes, or at all events such as affect butter.

The top of Mount Warirata is composed of the volcanic breccia in situ, and it formed imposing tors. I noticed several volcanic bombs in the blocks which weathered in concentric laminæ.

On passing the top we entered on a grassy plateau, or rather spur, along which we proceeded for a few miles. The plateau vegetation was very similar on the whole to that of the lower hills, with the addition, as I have already remarked, of the banksias, cypress pines, and melastoma. Among the smaller plants were a few ground orchids, one with a green flower somewhat resembling a listera, but with different leaves, and an umbrella fern. Remarkable streamers of a sulphur-green lichen depended from the boughs of the gums.

We next made a steep descent across a river gully, and after one or two clambers up and down wooded mountain valleys, we dismounted in a bamboo thicket close to a tributary of the Laroki River.