250 TROPIC DAYS 



desirable food proves that they were often enterpris- 

 ingly, daringly hungry. 



Let us push on, there is far to go. Chance rather 

 than principle, it has been said, turned the paths of 

 old England into roads. Here may be studied the 

 germ of the primal path worn by the tread of the least 

 reflective and least mobile of human beings, the causes 

 of its erratic course, and the transitions by which, with 

 amendments due to the irrefutable facts of topography, 

 it becomes formal and authoritative a highway for 

 the usurping race. 



Leaving the shore, one branch of the track crosses 

 the high- water fold, follows the bend of a mangrove 

 creek, through which it makes a muddy ford, and is 

 firmly impressed through forest country where every 

 tree is orchid-encumbered, and where the eager soil 

 produces its own varieties. It wriggles up and along 

 a ridge, with the glaucous spathes of grass trees standing 

 like spears on each hand, and where wattle and tough 

 she-oaks grow leanly out of hard soil, thickly strewn 

 with buckshot gravel, rust-coloured. 



Soon it descends into a low valley and through a belt 

 of fan-palms and jungle bordering an ever-flowering 

 stream the banks of which are knee-deep in fat, rich 

 loam. Huge tea-trees stand in the water, where the 

 fibrous roots are matted like peat. 



Out of the moist coolness the track abruptly ascends 

 to a pleasant forest, and thence drops almost imper- 

 ceptibly to tea-tree flats intersected by Pandanus creeks, 

 which bulge here and there into sedge-margined lagoons. 

 In this "devil-devil " country it is barely the width 

 of the foot, and it wanders sinuously like the trail of 

 a lazy snake. Sometimes it is barely more discernible 

 than such a trail, and again in the soft places it broadens 

 and deepens, for the man with boots has taken the place 



