[Note: this transcription was produced by an automatic OCR engine]

PORT OLRY AND A “SING-SING” 125

noiselesst on the soft ground. With a branch he
sweeps aside the innumerable spider-webs that droop
across the path, to keep them from hanging in
our faces. Silently the other men follow behind;
once in a while a dry branch snaps or a trunk
creaks.

In this dark monotony we go on for hours,
without an outlook, and seemingly without purpose
or direction, on a hardly visible path, in an endless
wilderness. We pass thousands of trees, climb
over hundreds of fallen trunks and brush past
millions of creepers. Sometimes we enter a clearing,
where a gaint tree has fallen or a village used to
stand. Sometimes great coral rocks lie in the
thicket; the pools at their foot are a wallowing-
place for pigs.

It is a confusing walk; one feels quite dizzy with
the constantly passing stems and branches, and a
white man would be lost in this wilderness Without
the native, whose home it is. He sees everything,
every track of beast or bird, and finds signs on
every tree and vine, peculiarities of shape or grouping,
t which he recognizes with unerring certainty. He
describes the least suggestion of a trail, a footprint,
tor a knife-cut, or a torn leaf. As the white man
finds his way about a city by means of street signs,
so the savage reads his directions in the forest from
the trees and the ground. He knows every plant
and its uses, the best wood for fires ; he knows when
he may expect to find water, and which liana makes
the strongest rope. Yet even he seems to feel some-