the scenery. Why, this place reminds me of a real pretty bit of scenery
near my home town in Maine."

Of course I lied when I said that. You couldn't find any scenery like
that outside the tropics. That place was queer; there wasn't the
slightest doubt about that. I recalled as I stumbled along how a trader
at Metalanim in the Caroline Islands had swam out to our schooner when
we were down there the previous year, and how the poor devil had told
old Hergoff, the captain, that a chatak tree at the back of his hut had
begun to make faces at him, and I began to understand the complaint that
had gripped that trader as I climbed along by the side of the puffing
islanders. He had been jammed up too close against a personality. When a
place has been too long by itself, as Holman had remarked, it cultivates
a strength that tries the nerves of an explorer, more especially if it
is situated near the equator. Places like Papua, the Caroline Islands,
parts of Borneo, and the Never Never country in inland Australia seem
to possess a fist that attempts to push you off when you endeavour to
bring the atmosphere of civilization into a silence that has been
unbroken for centuries.

Holman went back to the sisters, and we moved slowly forward. The basalt
rocks came closer, showing plainly through the breaks in the lianas that
grew less thickly on the higher slopes. The creepers fell away slowly,
as if they had done the work they were required to do, and before we
realized it we were walking between two natural walls of rock about
eighteen feet high, above which the sky looked like a strip of blue
paper that rested upon the marvellously even tops of the barriers.

The Professor was gurgling joyfully as we tramped through that miniature
cañon. He was bumping up against new wonders at every footstep, and he