Page:Rowland--The Mountain of Fears.djvu/23

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THE MOUNTAIN OF FEARS

kindly people to us, who understood such. The 'Barbary Coast' in San Francisco, the parks in Melbourne, or the water-front in Hong Kong, are all more dangerous than Papua. "We wandered through these people, accompanied by kindness, a whole tribe sometimes bearing our burdens until they reached a district dangerous to them, but where we made new friends. We wandered through this dreamland unmolested, walked with its fantastic peoples, black and brown and piebald; strayed in and out to the click-click-click of our little hammers, meeting dangers, it is true—the dangers which might confront a child walking blindfolded through a botanical garden filled with perils to its ignorance—and we tap-tap-tapped with our little hammers right up to the slopes of the Malang-o-mor the 'Mountain of Fears'—and we tap-tap-tapped on its slopes of quartz and basalt, little thinking that we knocked at the door of an evil spirit."

The bluff bows of our little ship smashed

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