“Dutch New Guinea,” puffed the curator. “That’s our main drive this time. Our proa sails for there in a day or so.” “Dutch New Guinea!” The trader’s face grew suddenly grave. “My word, man! Have you read Captain Rawling’s report of the British expedition up the Mimika? Or about the Dutchman, Lorentz’s, dash to peak Wilhelmina in the Snow Mountains? He’s the only one who has got to them, so far.” “Sure! We’re familiar with all that. But I can say this to you, Bentham, you being an Australian: the trouble with the British, and with the Dutch, too, is that they can’t get away from the _safari_ idea. Get me? Every one of their expeditions failed because of it. Your Englishman must have his tub and his champagne, his big tents and heavy camp furniture, his tinned sweetmeats and what not, and it takes an army of porters to carry it all. He learned the _safari_ idea in Africa; but it won’t work in New Guinea, because you can neither move a _safari_ through the jungle nor live off the country with it. The British were a year and a half on the Mimika, and they never got within forty miles of the Snow Mountains. It took them five weeks to cut a _safari_ trail three miles long. All that country, from the Great Precipice to the sea, is a flat, dense jungle, with the rivers running through it so swiftly that they are impossible to ascend. They contented themselves with plane-table surveys made from a clearing in the jungle, and before long their army of porters died like flies of beriberi. “We are going to try the American idea,” he continued, “going light--‘pigging it,’ the British call it--but it gets you somewhere. We’ll take our own light, concentrated foods along, and live off the country on wallabys and wild pig for fresh meat. There’ll be plenty for us.” “But, man dea-rr--the danger!” objected Bentham. “These Aru niggers, here, had the fear of God dynamited into them some forty years ago, and they’ll jolly well never touch a white man again! But it’s different in Dutch New Guinea. They’re cannibals and head hunters, and most of them have never even seen a white man. The English territory is somewhat policed, but, my word! the Dutch have only two small posts six hundred miles apart on the whole west coast! You’ve heard of the Tugeri head hunters? Many a time our soldiers have chased them over the border--where they stay, to raid us again whenever they feel like it--as jolly a bunch of cannibals as ever cut a throat. And the pygmies of the mountains! My word! Your little party would be massacred the first step ashore. What could you do against fifty of them, or a hundred?” “Oh--we’ll manage!” twinkled the curator, mysteriously. “Man dea-rr, it’s foolhardiness! Here, let me give you some dynamite sticks, anyway. It’s plain suicide to go ashore without it. Our expedition, with its army of porters, was all right--but you!”