_Difficulty of Cross-country Travel—Expedition moves
towards the Mountains—Arrival at the Iwaka River—Changing
Scenery—The Impassable Iwaka—A Plucky Gurkha—Building
a Bridge—We start into the Mountains—Fording
Rivers—Flowers—Lack of Water on Hillside—Curious
Vegetation—Our highest Point—A wide View—Rare
Birds—Coal—Uninhabitable Country—Dreary Jungle—Rarely any
Beauty—Remarkable Trees—Occasional Compensations._
When our third and last batch of forty-eight coolies reached the
Mimika towards the end of December, it was at once evident from their
appearance that the majority of them would not last very long, and as
we had ourselves been already for a year in the country, it was agreed
that we should make a final effort to penetrate as far as possible
towards the mountains, and that when our means of transport came to an
end we should take our departure from New Guinea.
We had long realised the impossibility of reaching the Snow Mountains
from our present base. If we had possessed an efficient steam-launch or
motor boat, the Mimika was still too small a river and too frequently
unnavigable to be useful as a route for water transport. Another
consideration even more important than this was the fact that had the
Mimika been ten times the size it was, it would still have taken us in
a direction many miles to the West of the mountains we hoped to reach.
The result of these two circumstances was that we travelled by water
with great labour to a place (Parimau), which was still in low and
often flooded country, and from there we had to travel across country
for many miles before we came to the first rising ground.
[Sidenote: CROSS-COUNTRY JOURNEYS]
It is difficult enough in New Guinea to make a way up a river valley,
but you always have the comforting reflection that the river itself
leads you back to your base, when stores are exhausted and it is time
to return. But when you attempt to make a cross-country journey, not
only is the trouble of cutting a track much greater than it is in a
river bed, but there is the difficult and often somewhat dangerous
business of crossing the rivers; added to this is the risk, which
increases with every river you cross, of being cut off for a longer
or shorter period from your base camp and supplies by a sudden flood
in those same rivers. For this reason, when coolies were sent back
from an advanced camp to the base, they had to be supplied with an
extra allowance of food in the event of their being stopped by floods
on the way; such a proceeding meant diminishing to some extent the
store of food they had carried out and a consequent waste of labour.
It is essential, therefore, in trying to make a long journey in such a
country, to discover beforehand the river valley which will take you
nearest to your goal and thus avoid the risks of a long cross-country
journey.
No time was lost in sending a fleet of canoes heavily laden with stores
up the river from Wakatimi, and early in January the whole expedition
was assembled at Parimau with supplies sufficient for three months.
On the 14th January Marshall and Grant with two Dayak collectors,
forty-six coolies, thirty-one Papuans, and about forty soldiers and
convicts, by far the largest number of men we had ever sent off at one
time, set out for the Wataikwa river. A few of them went on with the
Europeans to the Iwaka, where a track was cut for two marches up the
valley of that river, while the rest, after leaving their loads at the
Wataikwa depôt, returned to Parimau to fetch more loads of stores. From
the Wataikwa the coolies carried on the stores to the upper camp on
the Iwaka river, a three days’ march, and at the beginning of February
Cramer and I went up there with the last party. About a hundred and
fifty loads of one kind or another had been carried up from Parimau in
these various excursions, but unhappily the coolies ate up a good many
of the loads on the way, and still more unhappily many of the coolies
fell sick, so that if we had wished to send back to Parimau for yet
another transport of stores, it would probably have ended in our having
no coolies to carry them any further.
The nett result of all this carrying was that when we arrived with
the last loads at the Iwaka depôt we found that we had only twelve
days’ provisions for our party of three Europeans, two Dayaks and
the twenty-two coolies who survived from the forty-eight of a month
earlier. Cramer had food for about the same number of days for his
party of soldiers and convicts. Such a meagre supply of provisions as
that obviously made it out of the question for us to penetrate far
into the mountains; but you must in New Guinea, as elsewhere, cut your
coat according to your cloth.
The Iwaka at the place where we first came to it is a tremendous
torrent flowing in rather a narrow stony bed. A little way further down
it spreads out into a wider channel like that of the Wataikwa, but it
is much larger than that river and though we searched down stream for
three or four miles, we found no place where it was possible to cross.
As we went up the river we very soon found that the river banks became
steeper, and it was soon evident that we were at last among the hills.
There was a peculiar satisfaction in bending one’s legs to go up hill
after having been for so many months on almost level ground. The track
was not at all easy, for it appeared that in many places large slices
of the hillside had slipped down, bringing with them a chaos of dead
and living trees over which we had to pick a precarious way. In some
places we crept along the edge of the torrent, and in others we climbed
high up the hillside to avoid a precipice where the river ran through
a narrow gorge; but it was all a pleasant change from the monotonous
jungle of the plains. There was more variety in the vegetation too as
we went on; creepers arranged themselves prettily on the rocky river
bank, and Fan-palms, which we had not seen before, grew in groups in
the more level places. There was a tree growing in many places whose
lower branches were covered at that season with small pink flowers,
which lent a grateful splash of colour to the usually gloomy green
of the jungle. There was an invigorating air of mountains in the river
as it came thundering over the huge boulders in its bed, and now
and again we even got a glimpse through the trees of the mountains
themselves, apparently not so very far distant from us.
[Illustration: LOOKING UP THE MIMIKA RIVER FROM THE CAMP AT PARIMAU.]
[Sidenote: THE UNFORDABLE IWAKA]
Two days’ scrambling up the valley brought us to the rest of the
party at the depôt camp, and there we learnt the very unwelcome news
of a discovery, which seemed likely to put an immediate end to our
explorations. The advanced party had climbed up a spur to the west
of the river and had seen that the Iwaka, instead of flowing (as we
imagined) from the North-east by an apparently wide valley, actually
flowed from the North through a deep, and in some places precipitous
gorge, which we could not possibly attempt to traverse with our feeble
coolies in the short time that remained to us.
If we were to advance at all, it was necessary for us to go in a
North-easterly direction, but there we seemed to be completely cut off
by the torrent of the Iwaka River. Attempts were made both upstream
and downstream to wade across, but nobody succeeded in doing it, and
no better luck attended those who tried to make a bridge by felling a
tree across the river, the bridge was at once swept away. As a last
expedient a large reward of money was offered to the first man who
should find a way across the river, and again they all set out full
of hope and armed with axes. The luck fell to two of the Gurkhas, who
cleverly felled a large tree straight across the river. Had it fallen a
few feet to one side or the other it would not have been long enough
to reach the other bank, and if it had bent a little more in the
middle, the water would have snatched it up like a straw and carried
it away in a moment. But it kept just clear above the water and made a
safe temporary bridge by which they could cross, and before nightfall
a single rope of rattan was securely tied across the narrowest part of
the river.
[Sidenote: A RATTAN BRIDGE]
During the night the river rose and carried away the tree, and it
seemed that with only one strand of rattan across the river the
prospect of our reaching the other side was not very good. Nobody
seemed inclined to risk the passage, even with the promise of a large
reward, until one of the Gurkhas, Jangbir by name, said he would go.
“There was only one way to go over—hand over hand, with a rattan round
his waist held by us in case the bridge strand broke, a very likely
thing, for it was extremely flimsy. Again the rope to hold him had to
be very thin, or the weight would tear him from his hold. He got across
finely, being dragged out straight by the torrent, until nearly over,
when he could make no more headway. The rope tied to his waist was paid
out fast, but was caught by the current, and then it was touch and go.
Thus he hung for half a minute, dragged out in a horizontal position.
If both rattans gave, it meant certain death; if he let go, the great
strain would snap the rope round him with a like result. The rope was
pulled in as quickly as possible, and then the lucky thing occurred.
The strain was too great, and the rope we were pulling on snapped.
This freed him, and he pulled himself up further and gained the
bank.”[24]
[Illustration: BRIDGE MADE BY THE EXPEDITION ACROSS THE IWAKA RIVER.]
When once a man was on the other side, it was simple to throw over
another rattan, and so to pull over many more which he tied to the
trees on his bank. On our side of the river was a large boulder with a
hole conveniently bored through it, into which stout posts were jammed
Y-fashion, and over them the rattans were strained and fastened to the
trees behind. When more men were able to cross the river, a similar
structure was erected on the other bank.
The plan of the bridge was very simple, two hand-rails made of a
number of twisted rattans, and a foot piece made of a long thin tree,
which was secured to the hand-rails by loops of rattan. The span
of the bridge was about one hundred feet, and there must have been
several hundred yards of rattan used in its construction. The credit
of the idea and of most of the work in making the bridge is due to the
Gurkhas, without whose help we should never have crossed the Iwaka.
But all this work had occupied valuable time, and when the bridge was
finished we found that we had provisions left for only eight days
longer. On February 8th Rawling, Marshall and I, with three Gurkhas and
nineteen coolies, and Cramer with a small party of convicts, crossed
the Iwaka and made a way Eastwards. After crossing a moderately steep
ridge we came down to a stream of marvellously clear water, which
brought us in a short time to another large river flowing out of the
mountains in a Southerly direction.
So many rivers are there in this region that this was in some places
separated by less than two miles from the Iwaka; it was eventually
found that this was a branch of the Wania, a large river which enters
the sea in a common mouth with the Kamura, of which the Iwaka is a
tributary. It was evident that this river came from the slopes of Mount
Godman (9,500 ft.) a huge mass immediately to the North of us, and it
was our intention to climb up on to the ridge of that mountain in the
hopes of obtaining a view of the country to the North of it, and of the
Snow Mountains.
Going up the valley we found ourselves in the midst of really beautiful
scenery. The mountains soon closed in about us, and the river, though
not running through an actual gorge, was walled by precipices of white
limestone rock, now on one side and now on the other. This necessitated
our frequently crossing the river, a task by no means easy even when
the water is low, as it happened to be at that time. The best way of
crossing those rapid rivers is not to fight your way upwards and across
the stream, but to go rather with the stream in a sloping direction
towards the other bank, and to go as quickly as may be. The bottom is
made of very slippery stones, and a false step means disaster, as we
all found at different times, but in that way you cross with far less
exertion than by breasting the stream.
In this valley, for the first time since we came to New Guinea, we
found several flowering plants; among the rocks by the river grew
clumps of a large pink Balsam, and on the moss at the foot of the tree
trunks was a beautiful scarlet _Begonia_ with a remarkably hairy leaf.
There was a curious green-flowered aroid with a large blotched leaf,
and growing everywhere over the cliffs and the tree trunks were Pitcher
plants (_Nepenthes_) of two species.
On the second day we camped on a sort of shelf on the hillside, two or
three hundred feet above the river, and as our progress up the valley
had been so slow, it was certain that we should not be able to reach
the summit ridge before we were obliged to turn back by lack of food.
So it was decided to go straight up the spur on which we then were
in the hope that from the top we might see a view of the surrounding
country. On the following day we climbed up about two thousand feet;
the hillside was exceedingly steep, and the men had to haul themselves
up by the roots of the trees above them.
[Sidenote: LACK OF WATER]
At our camp on the hillside—there was not a square yard of level
ground—we were troubled for the first time in New Guinea by a lack of
water. No rain had fallen for two days, and the ground was so steep
that all the water had run off, and it was a long time before the
Gurkhas found a trickle of water in a gully some distance away, whence
a supply was laboriously fetched to the camp.
On the fourth day we climbed up about two thousand feet further, but
with a great deal more difficulty. The trees became smaller as we went
up, but infinitely denser, and for a great part of the way we scrambled
up, not along the ground, but over a fantastic network of roots and
trunks of dead and living trees, all of them covered with mosses and
festooned with a wonderful variety of creepers. In some places we
were clambering over the topmost branches of the tangle of vegetation,
and in others we were burrowing into mossy caves and grottoes among
the roots. It was a weird and rather uncanny place and, except that it
lacked the beauty of colour that is found there, it recalled the forest
at ten thousand feet in Ruwenzori more than any other place I have seen.
At 5,000 feet we found ourselves on the ridge, a narrow knife-edged
spur of Mount Godman, and there we camped. It was a most unlikely
looking spot for a camp, but the ridge beyond was a great deal worse—it
took the Gurkhas many hours to cut the narrowest track along it for
half a mile—so we had to make the best of the place that we had
reached. A number of trees were cut down and the irregularities of
the ground were more or less filled up with the branches, and there
we pitched our tents and spread our beds. There was a small shrub
(a species of _Erica_, I think), which, when burnt, filled the air
with a delicious smell of incense, strangely out of keeping with our
surroundings.
Though we had been surrounded by dense clouds since we reached the
ridge, it obstinately refused to rain for the third day in succession,
a thing quite unprecedented in our experience of the country. Happily
the mosses, which clothed everything, were full of moisture and we had
only to squeeze them like sponges to get water in plenty; the coolies
of course complained of the dirty colour of their rice when it was
cooked in mossy water, but we found that it gave to ours an unfamiliar
and not unpleasant taste.
[Illustration: LOOKING WESTWARDS FROM ABOVE THE IWAKA RIVER.]
[Illustration: THE COCKSCOMB MOUNTAIN (10,050 FT.) SEEN FROM MOUNT
GODMAN.]
[Sidenote: A WIDE VIEW]
The greater part of the next day was spent in cutting a way along the
ridge to a point (5800 ft.) from which it was hoped that a view of the
country might be seen. Long before the track was cut the clouds were
down upon us, and no view could be seen, so we decided to stay for
another day, although we had only one day’s food remaining. But the
view that we saw on the following day was more than compensation for
our rather scanty fare.
Due North of us, and rising from the spur on which we stood, was the
great mass of Mount Godman, and to the West of that the even more
imposing peak of Wataikwa Mountain (9923 ft.). Between the two could be
seen a part of the tremendous cliffs of Mount Leonard Darwin (13,882),
the southern face of which appears to show an almost vertical precipice
of upwards of ten thousand feet. To the West ridge beyond ridge of
forest-covered heights stretched away to the ranges of the Charles
Louis Mountains in the far distance. To the East rose the beautiful
three-topped mountain called the Cock’s Comb (10,050 ft.), behind and
to the North of which heavy banks of clouds showed where the snows of
Mount Carstensz lay hidden. Five thousand feet below us the mountains
ended almost abruptly, and the southern half of the circuit of our view
was occupied by the hideous plain of dull green jungle to a hazy line
of the sea forty miles away. Here and there the sunlight caught the
waters of innumerable rivers, and we could distinctly see those that we
had crossed, the Tuaba, Kamura, Wataikwa, and the Iwaka. Further to the
East was a still bigger river, the Wania, which we could trace down
to its lagoon-like estuary, and beyond it was the Aiika, and a very
distant river, possibly the Newerip.
Nobody who has not spent a year and more in a dreary jungle country,
where you are seldom more than a yard or two from the nearest tree, and
where the limit of your view is the opposite bank of a stagnant river,
can realise the rest, to the mind and to the eye alike, that a wide
horizon gives. Although there were points of interest to be seen by the
cartographical eye, there was nothing, excepting the outlines of some
of the nearer mountains, of beauty in that view; there were no striking
features of the land and no gorgeous effects of colour, but one will
always treasure a recollection of the physical delight of seeing far
and wide to the horizon, and of the feeling of satisfaction in looking
down godlike on the world that we had so painfully traversed.
But views, like all other good things, have their ends, and ours was
all too soon interrupted by the daily thick blanket of white cloud,
which rolled up and enveloped us until nightfall. We groped our
way back to the camp where we found our coolies very miserable and
shivering with cold—poor wretches, they had never before endured, nor
even imagined, a temperature so low as 50° F. To us the coolness was
very pleasant, and it provoked a hunger to which we had long been
strangers; very small quantities of boiled rice, and _chupatties_ made
by the Gurkhas of mildewed and weevilly flour, only served to stimulate
our appetites for more.
[Sidenote: RARE BIRDS]
On the following day we retreated hastily downhill by the way we had
come, and by forced marches, perhaps a little accelerated by our lack
of food, in two days we arrived at the Iwaka camp. In the meantime
Grant had been camped with the two Dayak collectors on a hill about
three thousand feet high above the Iwaka, where they had made a very
fine collection of birds. Among them was a new dwarf species of
Cassowary (_Casuarius claudi_) and specimens of the rare Six-plumed
Bird of Paradise (_Parotia meeki_). Another bird very characteristic
of the Iwaka and neighbouring valleys is the Moustached Swift
(_Macropteryx mystacea_), which measures more than two feet across the
wings, and is remarkable for its long pointed tail and its tapering
white moustache. This bird seldom appears until late in the afternoon,
when it is seen sailing majestically with outstretched wings at a
height over the river.
Near the Iwaka on a hillside laid bare by a landslip we found two seams
of coal a few inches in thickness; it was poor stuff and only burnt
with difficulty when put into a fire. Mr. Lorentz found combustible
coal in the hills near Mount Wilhelmina, and it is probable that a
careful search would reveal the existence of better coal in this region
too. Near the same place, as well as in one or two other localities, we
found indications of petroleum, but all our searches for gold and other
precious metals resulted in nothing except occasional traces of copper.
During the following days, while we were stumbling back to Parimau
along the now familiar track, we wondered whether we should be the
last as well as being the first Europeans to penetrate into that
forsaken region. It has been mapped now, and our wanderings have shown
that it is not the way by which any sane person would go who wished
to explore the Snow Mountains. It is a region absolutely without
inhabitants, and the Papuans, who live on the upper waters of the
Mimika and Kamura rivers, shun it even as a hunting ground. There are
no precious metals or other products of the soil to be won, and not
until all the other forests in the world are cut down will its timber
be of value. So it may safely be supposed that it will long be left
untouched; the Birds of Paradise will call by day, the cassowaries will
boom by night, and the leeches will stretch themselves anxiously on
their leaves, but it will be a long time before another white man comes
to disturb them.
[Sidenote: THE DREARY JUNGLE]
Many people have the idea that a tropical forest is full of gorgeous
flowers, about which brilliant butterflies are constantly flitting
and birds of splendid plumage flash from tree to tree. This idea is
no doubt due in a great measure to the habit of gathering together in
hothouses the flowering plants of all the Tropics, though they may
have come from Central America, from Africa and from Borneo or Java.
It is true that there are many splendid birds, but the vegetation is
so dense that you seldom, if ever, see them; the brilliant butterflies
are mostly out of sight near the topmost branches of the trees; and you
may travel for days together without seeing a single flowering plant.
Many of the trees are covered with orchids on all their branches, but
they very seldom flower, and the flowers of most of them are so
insignificant that they do not attract your attention.
[Illustration: THE SUPPORTS OF A PANDANUS (30 FEET HIGH).]
Occasionally you may see high above your head the white flower of a
_Dendrobium_ or the long spike of the gigantic _Grammatophyllum_, but
I have only once (in a small island on the North coast of New Guinea)
seen such a mass of flowering orchids as to make a splash of colour in
the view. In the Tropics there is nothing comparable in colour with the
blue hyacinths, the fields of buttercups, or the gorse and hawthorns of
this country.
But if there is little that is beautiful in the jungle vegetation,
there is a great deal that is curious and interesting. The ubiquitous
Rattans, climbing Palms, are a constant source of wonder for their
snake-like meanderings through the jungle until they climb to the
top of some tree where they end in a bunch of leaves. We found three
species of Screw Pines (_Pandanus_), fantastic trees on stilts, and
branching like irregular candelabra. The wood of the _Pandanus_ is very
tough, and is used by the natives for making bows and spears; the long
ribbon-like leaves are used for mats and the walls of their huts, and
the fruits of some are eatable, but exceedingly hard. One species bears
a cluster of small red fruit about the size of a banana; and another
bears a huge melon-shaped fruit of a brilliant scarlet colour and
weighing as much as thirty pounds and upwards.
Equally remarkable are the trees which stand propped on a number of
aerial roots and seem, as Mr. Wallace noted,[25] to have started
growing in mid air; where several of these trees grow together, it is
difficult to say where one ends and another begins. Too rarely you
come across a magnificent forest tree (usually, I believe, a species
of _Dammara_) supported on huge buttresses, which begin twenty or more
feet above the ground and spread out for many yards from the foot of
the tree. We had occasion to cut down some of these trees, and found
the wood intensely hard; if there were seven or eight buttresses a
single one would still hold up the tree after all the rest had been
cut. When the tree had been felled, the stump looked like a great
starfish sprawling over the ground with a centre not more than a foot
across, while the trunk a few feet up had been a yard or more in
thickness.
It has happened to me to walk through many hundreds of miles of forest
in different parts of the world, but I have never seen any so dreary as
that New Guinea jungle with its mud, its leeches, its almost unbroken
stillness, and its universal air of death. Happily the mind of man
is of a curiously selective habit, and it chooses to retain only the
more pleasant things; you forget the long wet weeks of rain and mud,
the hunger and the nasty food, and remember rather those glorious
moments when you came out of the twilit jungle into an open river bed
and saw the distant mountains, or those rare sunny afternoons when the
“implacable cicala” creaked in the treetops above your tent.
[Sidenote: FUTURE TRAVELLERS]
There are indeed a thousand things to interest one in the jungle,
however blank and monotonous it may seem to be. The trouble is that so
much of your attention in these places must be devoted to the trivial
duties of the day, the eternal question of food, the care of the sick,
the precautions against floods, and so on, that but little time is
left over for studying the hidden wonders of the world about you. The
geographers and the naturalists of the future will live in comfortable
ships on the coast, whence they will fly daily into the heart of New
Guinea where they will find things undreamt of now. But the time for
that is not yet, and in the meantime those who plod on foot do the best
they can.