d Matonia
pectinala, with their slender stems and wide-spreading palmate fronds
towering two feet above our heads. The delicate maidenhair lay like a
rich carpet beneath our feet, while hundreds of magnificent climbing
pitcher-plants doused us with water as we knocked against them. Our
sympiesometer showed us that we were twenty-eight hundred feet above
the sea.

Beyond the padang-batu we entered a forest of almost Alpine character,
dwarfed and stunted. For several hours we worked along ridges,
descended into valleys, and ascended almost precipitous ledges, until
we finally reached a peak that was separated from the true mountain
by a deep, forbidding canon.

Several of the older men of the party gave out, and we were forced
to leave them with half our baggage and what water was left: there
was a spring, they told us, near the summit.

The scramble down the one side of the canon, and up the other, was a
hard hour's work. Its rocky, almost perpendicular sides were covered
with a bushy vegetation on top of a foundation of mosses and dead
leaves, so that it afforded us more hindrance than help.

Just below the summit we came to where a projecting rock gave us
shelter, and a natural basin contained flowing water. Dropping my load,
and hardly waiting to catch my breath, I was on my way up the fifty
feet that lay between us and the top. In another moment I had mounted
the small, rocky, rhododendron-covered platform, and stood, the first
of my party, on the summit of Mount Ophir. The little American flag
that I had brought with me I waved frantically above my head, much
to the amusement of my attendants.

Four thousand feet below, to the east, stretched the silver sheen of
the Indian Ocean. The smoke of a passing steamer lay like a dark stain
on the blue and white of the sky. Close into the shore was the little
capital town of Bander Maharani, connecting itself with us by a long,
snake-like ribbon of shimmering light,--the great river Maur.

To the north and west successive ranges of hill and valley, divided
by the glistening river, and all covered by an interminable jungle
of vivid green, fell away until lost in the cloudless horizon.

For a moment I stood and gazed out over the vast expanse that lay
before me, my mind filled with the wild, unwritten poetry of its
jungles and its people; then I turned to my companion.

"It is beautiful!"

He shrugged his shoulders.

"But not equal to the view from our own Mount W