SECRETS OF NEW GUINEA.

Waikato Times, Volume 96, Issue 15354, 1 October 1923, Page 6

SECRETS OF NEW GUINEA.

MEN WITH TAILS. There are secrets still untouched in the heart of New Guinea —more gold to be found, more oil, rivers to be traced, unconquercd mountains to be climbed, large areas of unknown country to he visited, where one may discover races and customs unlike anything hitherto known to man. The country is a storehouse of new things. Every now and then a collector, sent out h.y some rich man gifted with scientific tastes, finds butterflies and moths that no one has ever seen before; birds, too, undcscribed .in any work on ornithology. There are rumours of new animals; sometimes, as in the case of the tree-climbing kangaroo, rumour justifies itself. The “devil pig,” many sizes larger than the common wild boar, has been seen by natives, but the white man has only come upon its tracks. There are tales of an iguana larger than the largest Gft specimen known to hunters and collectors —a creature with the fierceness of an alligator, much feared by inland tribes, who declare that it chases them even up trees and tears them to pieces. It may exist, or it may not. ’ Tailed men, according to the New Guinea native, exist in the far interior; the most circumstantial accounts arc offered of their anatomy and their ways, but the explorer, pressing day by day into the unknown, finds, day by day, that the tailed man ever eludes him. Invariably the Papuan with a tail, “all same doggy-dog,” is just over the next range. Veiled women, wearing the dress of an Eastern lady, eye-holes and all, have been found by explorers in the heart of ,a country where, as a general rule, short grass kilts or nothing are the custom. A Government expedition quite recently discovered men in armour; it is true the arpiour was made of iron-hard split cane, instead of metal, but it was complete and not at all unlike the medieval patterns worn by our own ancestors. There is a place where an expedition, starved out, had to turn back some years ago, where no one has ventured since. At that place a look-out on the top of a mountain shows something that recalls the wildest tales of Edgar Allan Poe. For many miles the whole country Is sloped and tiled downwards towards one central spot, much as the water in a basin slopes when the plug is drawn. In the middle of all there seems to be a gigantic funnel or opening. Where it leads to and what it is no one knows. It is not the common volcano formation; the place is said to look as if “the country had turned inside out and fallen through." Some day another expedition will go a little further, and the secret will b 3 told.—Beatrice Grimshaw, in the London Magazine.