We ascended steadily up a moderate slope for several miles, keeping the ravine
on our left. It was comparatively easy work after we had left the jungle behind.
After crossing a level plateau we once more found ourselves in a forest so dense
that our men had to use their parangs again. The heat of the jungle was intense,
and we suffered severely from the stings of a fly that is not unlike a cicada in
shape.
From the jungle we emerged into an immense stone field,—padang-batu, the
Malays called it. It extended along the mountain side as far as we could see, in
places quite bare, at others deeply fissured and covered with a most luxuriant
vegetation. We tramped at times waist deep through ferns, some green, some
dark red, and some lined with yellow, clumps of the splendid Dipteris Horsfieldi
and 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 cañon.
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 cañon, 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