Up through the giant mass of lawyer-vine with knotted trunks thick and hard as a walking stick and supple as a morning-glory; from their stems exotic orchids hung so richly that blossoms whipped your face as you struggled through greenish twilight. Tree ferns were fine as cobwebs. The trail was like a slippery stairway running through a tunnel of opalescent gauze. Rain sifted over clothes that were bogged in perspiration. Then a small clearing. An awful shriek—What was that? The air was all trailing plumes and angel wings, flying colors that you can’t believe, even when you see them. Birds of paradise, dozens and dozens of them, whirling away to the mysterious nests which no hunter-ornithologist has ever found.
With every hundred feet of climb we seemed to see a new variety, plumed with white and rose and gold. Much higher were the rare blue ones, which they say are worth twenty-five pounds—if a hunter dares shoot protected game. With every flight there was that fierce, dissonant “Caw-caw-caw.” My eyes were tired of miracles; I was aware of the oozing blisters on my heels, the miserable wetness of my shirt. “Oh, go along!” I scolded. “You’re nothing but a lot of painted crows.” We appreciate beauty best from a padded chair.
One afternoon, dead to the world, we flopped down in the resthouse 2,400 feet in air. These resthouses are among the mercies which the priests have scattered for their own long tours and for the comfort of travelers. Little bamboo huts are closed with combination locks; the Fathers give you the combination before you start on a trip. Houses are provided with chairs and beds, and set at distances that measure off a strong man’s endurance for the day. No Alpine traveler, coming upon a hospice of St. Bernard, could have been more gratified than we, sitting in real chairs while we opened blisters in our heels and covered them with adhesive plaster. Tea revived us, and we squatted around the door.
We were over the clouds. Far above them was the crazy pattern of zigzag points and ridges. Everything was angled into steeps without even a hand’s breadth of level ground. Waterfalls cascaded through the glossy jade and emerald. People go crazy in Papua. Why not? All that journey, we had struggled past cliffs honeycombed with caves that were stuffed with orchids and draped with crimson begonias; birds of paradise flew, arabesques through slanting sun. Now that I am an older man, retired and with time to think it over, I wonder if I really saw it. This was not the land of human beings. When I was a small boy my mother used to scare me, singing:—
Up the airy mountain,
Down the rushy glen,
We daren’t go a-hunting
For fear of little men.
We didn’t meet the little men until the day we scaled a higher ridge toward Dilava. Dark figures were stealing toward us across a breakneck stretch of open ground. “They’re Kunis,” Connelly said. This might have caused a shudder, but these tiny people—the tallest was no more than midget-size—were unarmed and mostly women. They carried loads on their backs, suspended by straps across their foreheads; baskets of vegetables, bundles of firewood piled on top, and on top of that a baby. The women were naked except for a G-string. They had chic, pretty little faces; their bodies were curiosities of distortion: powerful thighs, short legs, pigeon breasts, sway backs. Their feet were stranger still, with toes that spread out like the claws of clutching birds. The few men who were with them showed the same anatomical freakishness, the same G-string.
They made gestures toward their fallen loads and let us know that they had come to sell vegetables and not to eat us. I studied them and learned the secret of their odd shapes. The Kuni people never follow the zigzag trails as other tribesmen do. When they cross a ridge they go straight up it, straight down the other side. The continual strain of hillside walking had thrown their whole skeletal structure out of line. When I saw them walking across one of the few level places in the district I was struck by their clumsy waddling gait. Yet give them a mountainside and they speed up like so many goats. They are a study for evolutionists; the effect of environment on physical characteristics. I wonder if their babies are born that way?