Bunyip Land: A Story of Adventure in New Guinea

by George Manville Fenn

I used to wish that Jack Penny would not smile, for the effect upon his smooth boyish countenance was to make him look idiotic. When the doctor smiled there was a grave kindly benevolent look in his fine heavily-bearded massive face. When Jimmy smiled it was in a wholesale fashion, which gave you an opportunity of counting his teeth from the incisors right back to those known as wisdom-teeth at the angles of his jaws. He always smiled with all his might and made me think of the man who said he admired a crocodile because it had such a nice open countenance.

Jimmy had a nice open countenance and a large mouth; but it in no respect resembled a crocodile’s. His regular teeth were white with a china whiteness, more than that of ivory, and there was a genuine good-tempered look about his features which even the distortion produced by anger did not take away. It was only the rather comic grotesqueness seen sometimes in the face of a little child when he is what his mother calls a naughty boy, and distends his mouth and closes his eyes for a genuine howl.

But Jack Penny had a smile of his own, a weak inane sickly smile that irritated instead of pleasing you, and made you always feel as if you would like to punch his head for being such a fool, when all the time he was not a fool at all, but a thoroughly good-hearted, brave, and clever fellow—true as steel—steel of the very elastic watch-spring kind, for the way in which he bent was terrible to see.

So Jack Penny went about smiling and slapping people’s backs till it was time to go, and we all watched the cessation of the flood with eagerness.

The doctor, in talking, said that it was evident that this gorge ran right up into quite a mountainous region acting as a drain to perhaps a score of valleys which had been flooded by the sudden storm, and that this adventure had given us as true an idea of the nature of the interior we were about to visit as if we had studied a map.

Down went the water more and more swiftly till, as I was saying to the doctor how grand it must have been to see the flood rolling over the great fall, we saw that the rocky ledge along which we had come and that on the other side of our little haven of safety were bare and drying up, being washed perfectly clean and not showing so much as a trace of mud.

“Let us get on at once,” the doctor said; “this is no road for a traveller to choose, for the first storm will again make it a death-trap.”

So here we were rescued, and we started at once, every one carefully avoiding the slightest reference to the fate of our pursuers, while in the broad light of day, in place of looking terrible, the chasm was simply grand. The cool rolling water seemed to bring with it a soft sweet breeze that made us feel elastic, and refreshed us as we trudged along at an ordinary rate, for there was no fear now of pursuit.

So with one or two halts we walked on all day till I felt eager to get out from between the prison-like walls to where the trees were waving, and we could hear the voices of the birds. Here there was nothing but stone, stone as high as we could see.

It was a great drawback our not being able to converse with the bearers, but we amended this a little every hour, for Ti-hi struggled hard to make us understand how much he knew about the place and how he knew that there were such floods as this from time to time.