Our temporary dwellings were of the simplest. Harry and I occupied an ordinary fly-tent, and another was pitched for our native followers. On the day after our arrival we set about constructing a rough bridge for our own convenience. This we did by felling a tree on one side of the stream and letting it fall across the river bed as far as it would go. We repeated the operation with a thinner tree, which we let fall from the opposite bank, and the branches of the two intertwining in the middle, gave the structure some sort of continuity. Along the two trunks we could scramble without any very great difficulty. Our feat of engineering, however, was as nothing compared to the one achieved by our savage neighbours, for at a little distance up the stream the Papuans had spanned the gorge with a most wonderful suspension bridge. Across the ravine they had swung four main chains of bamboo. These were fastened at each end to a rigid horizontal cross-piece, and this again was braced on one side of the river to two trees, of no very great thickness, but of tremendous sustaining power, while on the other the chains were laid over the top of an enormous crag, then across a little depression in the ground behind it, and so were made fast to trees at the height of a few feet from the ground. The four main chains were under-girt with loops of bamboo, forming a cradle, along the bottom of which single bamboos were laid on end, affording a precarious footway. The total length of the span was at least 150 feet, and it swung clear of the tree-tops on the wooded sides of the gorge. At its greatest dip the bridge must have been 70 feet above the river. The elasticity and swing were tremendous, and I confess that the passage of the bridge was no joke to one unaccustomed to its giddy eccentricities. On this veritable tight-rope custom is everything, for I have seen fifteen native carriers at one time dancing carelessly across it, regardless of their heavy loads and of the tremendous increase in the oscillation that their numbers caused. I crossed with some natives of the district, and having descended the right bank of the St. Joseph for about a mile, we came to the mouth of a small tributary, the bed of which we ascended for a distance of half a mile. It was a toilsome ascent owing to the enormous boulders, to which I have already alluded, and I found that the safest way was to take off my shoes and stockings and clamber along bare-foot. At intervals among these boulders occurred calm pools of exquisite deep blue water, and these the natives choose as their fishing grounds. They favour the pools with the narrowest outlets, and dam with leaves the little waterfalls, or natural weirs over which the water rushes from one clear expanse to another.