This
Brought Us To A Place Where The Road Left The Stream, And Here We
Stopped To Breakfast.
We then had a long walk over the mountain,
by a tolerable path, which reached an elevation of about fifteen
hundred feet above the sea.
Here I noticed one of the smallest
and most elegant tree ferns I had ever seen, the stem being
scarcely thicker than my thumb, yet reaching a height of fifteen
or twenty feet. I also caught a new butterfly of the genus
Pieris, and a magnificent female specimen of Papilio gambrisius,
of which I had hitherto only found the males, which are smaller
and very different in colour. Descending the other side of the
ridge, by a very steep path, we reached another river at a spot
which is about the centre of the island, and which was to be our
resting place for two or three days. In a couple of hour my men
had built a little sleeping-shed for me, about eight feet by
four, with a bench of split poles, they themselves occupying two
or three smaller ones, which had been put up by former
passengers.
The river here was about twenty yards wide, running over a pebbly
and sometimes a rocky bed, and bordered by steep hills with
occasionally flat swampy spots between their base and the stream.
The whole country was one dense, Unbroken, and very damp and
gloomy virgin forest. Just at our resting-place there was a
little bush-covered island in the middle of the channel, so that
the opening in the forest made by the river was wider than usual,
and allowed a few gleams of sunshine to penetrate.
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