MOUNTAIN DWARFS.

Dominion, Volume 4, Issue 1084, 24 March 1911, Page 3

MOUNTAIN DWARFS.

KETUTfNED EXPLORER'S ACCOUNT OF AN UNKNOWN PEOPLE. Mr. Walter Goodfellow, the ornithologist invalided home from the British exploying expedition in the unknown interior of New Guinea, reached London recently in the steamer Brcconshire. Of the expedition's discovery of an unknown. race of mountain' dwarfs, ilr. Goodfellow said: "After a dozen or two had inspected us from afar and found us not quite so impossible as they had at first imagined they began to l>3 quite friendly with us, and before 1 fell ill wo had encountered at least a hundred. Curiously enough, wo never saw one of their women. Whether or no the men secreted them from us I cannot say. "The tallest man we met was only four feet six-inches, and it was evident that he regarded himself as a giant. Beautifully proportioned, many of them, especially the younger men, are also handsomely ' featured. 'Their skin of light bronze is a]so very frequently quite beautiful. Perhaps their greatest failing is their entire lack of any sense of cleanliness. I am sure that layers of dirt half an inch th'ick could be scraped off some of them. "With a thousand winged creatures chorusing above our heads, we hacked our way . yard by yard through tho forest towards , our goal—the summit of tho Snow Mountains. A day's march of a mile or so was not to be despised. The death of Mr. Wilfred Stalker, one of our party, is an illustration of tho terrors of> the. New Guinea forests. "Soon after we landed Sir. Stalker left camp alone to go shooting, and lost himself in the jungle. When we found his body in a creek some days later we noticed that his face was terribly scratched, as though he:had been tearing madly through the undergrowth. Probably lie had been overtaken by fever and had become delirious."