Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1915-09-19

| they used to say-how long ago it seemed!
in the old gymnasium back home where
the fights came off
1 If | said that Isola kept her beauty
| through this terrible march, | should be
/ telling lie. She had not She was thin,
worn, and yellow. No woman can keep
| her looks when she is worked to the limit,
\ and poorly fed to boot. 1sola's pace must
necessarily be the pace of all, and she had
responded nobly. Not word of COM
plant had left her lips since we had
| started, even though knew her to be so
weary every night that she moaned and
! sighed in her sleep.
| should never have had the heart to
drive her on as Red Bob did-to see her
stumble with WEAKNESS, when we came
/ near camping time, and to take her by the
/ hand and simply help her on, instead of
| letting her lie down and rest, as her tired
dark eyes so eloquently begged she might
/ do-to wake her in the morning if she
slept long through fatigue, and tell her
/ that we must be up and going. Yet l
| knew it was necessary. If our small stock
of food ran out we should be compelled
to seek the native villages and trade with
hem; and that was resort so desperate
that any alternative was safer.
A WEEK before | should have said that
l would carry Isola, if necessary
carry her from one side of New Britain
to the other. Was l not young and
strong, and could not have run round the
whole of Schoutens Island with her small,
light figure in my arms, if l had wished?
1 But had learned the difficulty of doing
4 your own carrying in Papuasia. In those
steaming thickets and swamps, where
sweat poured down your back and into
!, your eyes all day long, and your clothes
We're soaked through from dawn to dusk,
up those terrible precipices, where you
hung on by trailing vines, and crept slowly
from peak to peak, through the river
beds, jumping from stone to stone till
every muscle cried out in WEAKNESS, even
a twenty-five pound load, increased to
thirty by weapons and cartridges was
hatefully, miserably heavy.
Our loads lessened as we went on since
we ate our meat and biscuits day by day;
but the canvas that we stretched for
tent at night to keep off the furious
mountain rains, and the knives for trade,
I and our few clothes and belongings. re-
NAMED. Long before we had crossed the
first of the many ranges that rose behind
the coast, l had come to the conclusion
that carrying in tropic climates was a job
for blacks, and for no one else. We had
taken even the blankets from Isola after
the first hours walk-taken her small
parcel of clothing, which she declared
weighed nothing at all. She was anxious
to be allowed to help, if ever so little;
but we knew better than to let her.
And now here was Bo, good for fifty
pound load if needs were not affected by
the climate, not particularly liable to fever
Gore had dosed us with five grains of
quinine regularly every day, and it had
so far kept off malaria, but there was no
knowing how long that would last), and
exceedingly anxious to join himself to our
party again.
We accepted him readily gave him
lortion of our small stock of food and the
/ !, bacco he begged for, and asked him
B ,u,stions about the natives who had
II I l. IA A. All