“Sure! Watch me make a specimen of him!” said the enthusiast, picking up a small club. He held the end of the snake stick down on a rock, where a few judgmatical raps reduced his captive to a scientific curiosity.
Nicky dropped him in a small canvas bag which was pretty sure to have a few lizards and frogs and turtles in it, also, at any given time of day, and they set out upward again. A wide belt of century plants barred their way as they climbed higher. They grew in rank profusion, the great green leaves crossing in every direction, six feet high, and all armed with a dagger point at the tip and saw teeth along the blades. A man’s eyes would be worth nothing if he once got himself well into them.
A detour of about a mile brought them around the century plants, and then came lava escarpments, steep and difficult to climb. Up them they swarmed, and found themselves on a gradually rising, arid table-land with sparse vegetation growing all about, and magnificent views out in every direction.
Working southward, they finally came out on a bald knob that the curator had noted from the camp below and had determined to reach. Here the view was superb, wonderful—when you came to consider that all you looked at below was new and unmapped country. The curator’s pocket aneroid gave their height at a little over six thousand feet. Far over to the east could be made out the dim outlines of Geelvink Bay, with the limitless Pacific behind it. Below them, to the west, the slopes ran down sharply to the mangrove swamps that lined the shores fronting on the Banda Sea, with the long point of Cape Debelle jutting out as if on a small relief map directly below them. Beyond it, far over the sea, a bank of clouds on the horizon told them of Aru, a hundred miles away.
But it was to the south that their eyes turned with the most inquiring interest. Here the ranges rose higher and higher, under heavy banks of clouds, until, on the extreme horizon, the sun glinted on a white, snowy sea of mountains, jagged with peaks and caps, with Carstensz (17,000 feet) just visible as a tiny jutting point of white. Two hundred years ago Jan Carstensz, navigating along these shores, caught a glimpse of the Snow Mountains from the decks of his vessel and reported them in the ship’s log. It was such a rare glimpse, behind the eternal veil of clouds that shrouds the interior of New Guinea, that no one believed him. From that day to this, a lifting of the jungle clouds hanging low over the mountains, and the white man present to see them, have never come at the same time, so that even the existence of the high fellows in the interior has been regarded as a wild tale of Jan Carstensz. It was not for more than two centuries later, in 1911, that Jan Lorentz, another intrepid Hollander, with a party of twenty Dyaks, made a dash through the pygmy country and ascended the first one of the Snow Mountains, naming it Mt. Wilhelmina in honor of the Dutch queen.
From their own knob another wonderful feature of the country could also be seen, extending southward in a long flat perspective—the Great Precipice. For two hundred miles this precipice extends like a rampart, dividing the mountains from the flat jungle. It rises sometimes to a sheer height of ten thousand feet, undoubtedly the grandest precipice in the world. Sloping up to it, they could make out the jungle-clad talus, and beyond that the lowlands of the river country, widening out more and more as the coast land flowed southward. Dozens of rivers, they knew, cut through this jungle, out of sight in the green sea of foliage, and here was the scene of the English expedition, their party arriving full of hope and confidence, only to be baffled by the precipice and the swift floods of the rivers from getting farther than the foothills of the Snow Mountains. Here they had discovered the race of pygmies, and had visited one of their villages, collected implements of war and domestic usage, and, most valuable of all, a list of some fourteen words in their tongue, now carefully preserved for future use in the curator’s notebook.
“Nicky,” said the curator, after a long and careful examination of a spot on the jungly hills to the south of them, “I wish you would take a look at that scar over yonder, where a sort of ravine seems to run down the second mountain to the south of us. My eyes may be deceiving me, but—” He handed over the glasses.
Nicky looked eagerly, with his fresh young eyes glued to the binoculars.
“Huts! Little huts, ’way up in the tree tops! I’m sure of it!” he cried, after a careful scrutiny.
“I knew it!” said the curator, quietly. “Those huts up in the tree tops are where the unmarried girls of the pygmy tribes sleep. That marks it as a pygmy village. See if you can’t make out larger huts on the ground.”