EXPERIENCES WITH THE NATIVES 165 



Thus the collecting, whilst not very good, was fair. 

 But the country was rather difficult. In that hill 

 country the ground on which you walk is really 

 a false turf, formed by lichens growing on the 

 interlaced upper roots of the trees. As you walk 

 through the forest you may sink through this and 

 come to a kind of irregular underground cavern 

 between the true and the false surfaces of the ground. 

 If a bird or a butterfly or an animal is shot and falls 

 through the false surface, it is impossible of recovery. 

 Walking on that false surface, which quaked like a 

 bog all the time, was not comfortable. Altogether I 

 penetrated on this occasion up to a height of some 

 8000 feet. The climbing was not quite so difficult 

 on the north side as it had been on the south side of 

 the Owen Stanley Ranges. There were no foothills, 

 but the flat country ran up to the edge of the great 

 mountains. 



On this expedition I was unfortunate enough to 

 lose a couple of boys. I had brought altogether 

 eighteen with me, and I had established two camps, 

 one of them on a higher level, which was intended 

 mainly as a food-collecting camp. Between this 

 higher camp and my main camp, and also between 

 the main camp and the coast, I kept up fairly con- 

 stant communication by boys, who brought stores up 

 from the coast and native food down from the high 

 camp. One day, either by design or by coincidence, 

 a simultaneous attack was made by the hill natives 



