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244 PYGMIES AND PAPUANS 



Wallace noted,* 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 

 beheve, 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 stiUness, 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 w^et 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 

 * Malay Archipelago. Chapter V. 



