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.
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.
_Departure from Parimau—Parting Gifts—Mock Lamentation—Rawling explores Kamura River—Start for the Wania—Lose the Propeller—A Perilous Anchorage—Unpleasant Night—Leave the Motor Boat—Village of Nimé—Arrival of “Zwaan” with Dayaks—Their Departure—Waiting for the Ship—Taking Leave of the People of Wakatimi—Sail from New Guinea—Ké Islands—Banda—Hospitality of the Netherlands Government—Lieutenant Cramer—Sumbawa—Bali—Return to Singapore and England—One or Two Reflexions._
After our return to Parimau in February, Rawling and Grant went down to Wakatimi, while Marshall and I spent a week in visiting the village of the Tapiro in a last but vain attempt to see the pygmy women. The first few days of March were occupied in packing up the accumulated odds and ends of our year’s occupation and on the 9th of March we were ready to depart. We had told the natives that we were going away and for days before we went they pestered us with questions as to whether we were coming back and what we would give them when we went, and they quickly decided which of our houses they intended to occupy.