here he could cling and open the emergency cock in the
helmet. The suit deflated and he breathed new life. But here he suffered
his second immediate mishap, for as he scrambled to his feet a dizziness
took him and he slipped and pitched forward heavily, and with a great
clang of armor the god fell fainting at the very threshold of his world.

_Broke left arm getting ashore. Walking the beach when I met the
niggers. They dropped on their faces, and I saw I was elected._

These are the words with which Jim Albro chooses to make his note of a
scene that can scarcely have had its parallel in human experience. With
two dozen words, no more. You figure him there, I hope, that muffled
colossus with his huge copper helm flashing red and his monstrous
cyclopean eye agleam, striding along the strip of white beach against
the hostile green hills of Papua. You see him break, an incredible
apparition of power and majesty, upon the view of the dusky cannibal
folk and stand towering over their stricken ranks, triumphant--a glimpse
as through the flick of a shutter that passes and leaves the beholder
dazzled and unsatisfied! But the whole record is only a series of such
glimpses, some focused with startling lucidity, some clouded and
confused, and all too brief.

One other bit remains to fix the picture--an inimitable splash of color,
flung at the end of a perplexing page....

_I picked out the chief devil-devil doctor, and raised him to
honor. Old Gum-eye. Friend of mine._

Mark the spirit of the man. Whole chapters could supply no clearer
tribute to his resilience and entire adequacy. Unerringly he took the
right course to enforce the role thus amazingly thrust upon him and to
establish his godhead. Already he had caught up the situation, had put
its shock behind him. The inscription on the box remains his only
reference to the loss of the schooner and her crew. And while this might
seem to argue a certain lack of sensibility, I cannot feel it was so
with Albro. His was a nature essentially episodic, prompt to the play of
circumstance. The thing was done and past crying over; the blacks had
acted by their lights, and he had very swiftly to act by his. They had
given him his cue. How well he filled the part we can guess. By evening
he had been installed in some kind of temple or devil house as an
accredited deity to the Barange tribes....

* * * * *

Here ends the first part of