Nicky studied the jungle awhile, with intense concentration. “I see them,” he cried, handing the curator the glasses. “The small huts are built up in bare pandanus trees, and under the palms and bamboos around them I can see a brown shape like a bear’s back—that’s a thatched hut.”
Baldwin agreed with him, after a look for himself. Together they planned a route to reach the village in about two days’ march.
“Say, Mr. Baldwin, that war party of the Outanatas was on its way for a fight with them, when they came upon us—that’s my hunch!” declared Nicky, with sudden conviction.
“No doubt! There’s probably more or less of an old trail, if we look for it. And now for some plane-table surveys, Nicky.”
The curator unfolded a large blank sheet among the rear pages of his notebook, and on it drew a rough map of the country, with Nicky to help with comment and suggestion. Then out of his mess kit he took a flat, round brass box, which turned out to be a compass with folding sight bars. With this compass, bearing sights were taken of all the prominent peaks and hills in sight, and the map was then corrected to agree with the bearings.
Then the curator indicated a tall banyan tree growing on the end of a spur of the mountain opposite to them to the south.
“See that tree, Nick?” he asked. “We’ll climb up there to-morrow, and take all these bearings again from that point. Where they intersect these we have taken from here will be the true positions of all these interior peaks and valleys on our maps. That’s the way we make an accurate plane-table survey.”
“How about the distance from here to the banyan tree as a base line?” objected Nicky. “How’ll we lay that out on the map? We don’t know it.”
“We’ll measure it, son. We’ll lay off a base line down in those open swales where the cassowary got his Dwight, so to speak, and we’ll sight this knob and the banyan tree, both, from below. With a known base, and the two triangles erected on it by bearing angles, it’s a cinch to calculate the distance from this knob to the banyan.”
They descended the mountain to camp, finding Dwight up and about and puttering around his camp, an occupation he dearly loved. Baderoon was loafing to his heart’s content, and Sadok had succeeded in adding a rare black cockatoo to the collections. That evening Nicky and the curator went into the open and measured off a base line. From both ends of it their mountain knob and the banyan tree on the next mountain to the south could be sighted. The compass was set up on a stake, and the bearings of both points carefully taken from each end of the base line. It was dark when they got through.