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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

LOOKING WESTWARDS FROM ABOVE THE IWAKA RIVER.