THE BOY EXPLORERS IN
DARKEST NEW GUINEA
I
ARU
“LAND HO! fellows—yonder to the east. Can you make it out?”
The two youths beside the tall man who had spoken shaded their eyes from the tropical glare and searched the cloud banks on the horizon of the blue Banda Sea.
“I think I see it, sir,” said Dwight. “Part of those clouds seem to have faint white lines in them.”
“I see it!” exclaimed Nicky, peering through his glasses. “It’s developing out like a camera plate—high, jungly mountains that seem to be floating in the clouds. I see dark spaces now, with streaks of sunlight edging the outlines of the hills. Hurrah for Aru!”
“That’s not Aru; that’s Ke’,” returned the man. “Aru is too low and flat to be seen yet. It lies to the east of Ke’. Our bungalow is on Kobror, the southernmost of the Aru Islands; we ought to pass the port of Dobbo in a few hours.”
The three white men were standing before a small palm-thatched deck house which was their home on the Malay proa Kuching. Curator Baldwin of the National Museum was their leader. He was a tall, rangy giant of a man, his sinewy frame clad in tropical khaki, with the inevitable puttees of the East accentuating the muscular leanness of his long legs. One placed him easily—mining engineer or leader of a scientific field party, captain of his team in college days, most likely, that commanding sort of man to whom exploration in dangerous out-of-the-way places is all in the day’s work.
And the choleric blue eyes that looked a man in the eye from under his pith helmet, the sunburnt face with its gray mustache and firm chin, warned the casual stranger that here was the last man in the world to trifle with.
The two youths beside him were scarcely less noteworthy. Their resolute, weather-tanned young faces bespoke the hardy outdoorsmen, of the same breed, but younger, as the curator. Dwight was tall and spare, with a keen hatchet face and merry gray-green eyes that twinkled at one when he talked, yet they could grow hard and cold as ice in time of peril. Nicky was stout; habitually good-humored, habitually chuckling over the least joke, and always finding one and making himself the butt of it on every occasion. They were a great team; always “joshing” each other, always differing on every conceivable subject, yet devoted to each other and to the curator, whom they adored as an athlete and admired as a scientist. For two years they had been his assistants on expeditions in Africa and in British Guiana. He had picked them for this trip because of their tried and proven resourcefulness in facing conditions as they found them in wild lands. As unlike, physically, as two boys could be, they were alike in one thing—their sturdy independence of character. Original in everything they did, they copied no one, neither in their outdoor equipment nor in their ways of living when in the jungle.