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her death to think of the Sharers without it. I feel that without Alosha Ban the Sharers would have been more reasonable. But would more reason have made them more effective? The Ice Age Bubble was swelling before our eyes at the very time when she put herself to death in that most fearful fashion. Who can say what the thrill of wonder and of horror at her death might have done, or not have done, without the mingled sense of wonder and of dread that was current at that time, about the future of this planet and of the whole race of man?

The Telemarks had moved to Texas shortly after the Sharers had been organized. I think they went first to Fort Worth, and then to Waco. I knew of their being in Waco as early as January 1929. There Mr. Telemark fell in with two or three old friends of his, whom he had not seen since bachelor days. He now began to see a great deal of these old friends. The newspaper accounts of Alosha Ban's death said that he had been out very late on the previous night, and that one at least of those old friends of his was believed to have taken part in the horrible lynching of Henry Major. Henry Major was burned alive that night, in the presence of a large crowd of spectators. He was an elderly Negro of poor reputation, who was accused of having spoken familiarly to a young white woman, and was believed to have intended to assault her. He struck the young woman's father when accused by him.

The certain facts about Alosha Ban are that she disappeared from her home on the afternoon following the lynching, and that her burnt and blackened body was found lashed with wires to a broken fence-rail close beside the body of the burned Negro. It was found by a party of sightseers who had gone out on the second morning after, to view

the spot. It is thought that she had soaked her clothes with kerosene. In the afternoon of the second day following her disappearance, Kate Cotton received a letter from her, which had been postmarked on the day of her disappearance. It said in a few words that she had from the first resolved to be a Death Sharer, but had concealed her intentions for fear of interference with her plans.

She added, 'Will not some other white woman, especially some young and happy woman, share as I do the death of the next man lynched in her community? I leave my fellow women this in trust.'

The letter closed with saying, 'Death perhaps is not so terrible to an Oriental. Mohammedans are vividly aware of Paradise.'

Kate instantly gave out the letter for publication. Immediately she found herself the centre of a storm of condemnation from parents and clergymen and others for giving out the letter. They also bitterly condemned the newspapers for printing it. Others again condemned these clergymen and parents for calling any further attention to the letter and the suicide; and for some time there raged a considerable dispute as to how best to consign the letter to oblivion. Alosha Ban was everywhere condemned as a fanatic, a monster of asceticism, indeed a maniac.

Among the young women of all lands whose imaginations were fired to fever heat by her death and challenge was a young Frenchwoman, a student of medicine at the Sorbonne. This young woman as a child had known Jean Jaurès and she had seen him on the very day of his assassination. It had affected her strongly, and she had been considered peculiar ever since.

This Marie-Jeanne Fischer now called together some of her friends and colleagues and they banded them

selves into an order exclusively of the Death Degree, to share the extremities of war. Their vow was that for every person ever killed by the French army in war, whether by direct slaughter or by blockade, one of them would die in imitation of the death of that other, 'so long,' their manifesto declared, 'as our little numbers last.'

This, and not the Argentine legend, was the beginning of that wild order of Enemy Death Sharers, which within six months had its hundreds of members in Germany, Italy, and France, its thousands in Japan and India (twelve thousand, it used to be thought, in Burmah alone), and its smaller, but still determined, groups in the Anglo-Saxon countries. There were, I have been told, about two thousand in Mexico and South America combined. What lent the most terrible power to the order was its practice of keeping its list of members secret and merely announcing the total number in the country, and the pledge they had taken. Though they are often accused of having published vastly swollen estimates of their numbers, and of joining without intending to do more than scare the Government, subsequent investigations of their records seem to bear out the original statements pretty well. No doubt, if they had been put to the dreadful test, many would have faltered and left the order. But what anxious father could be sure that his daughter was not among the steadfast few who would not falter?

I almost wish the Recommendation of the Rio meeting might have been delayed a year or two, so that the world might have seen what the

Sharers could accomplish. For consider what they had already done. Housing improvements in England and America were already immense, even before the Rio meeting. No one denies that the prisons of the Orient in general were greatly improved - and few deny that the protest of the Chinese women had been the means of it. Personally I believe the Sharers would have ended war without any Recommendation at all.

Imagine a young married man going off to war, suspecting that his wife intended to imitate by her own death the death of the first man she could discover that he had killed. Imagine a general in the army having one of his own daughters forcibly fed while he was carrying out a punitive blockade against some rebellious subject tribe in Africa!

Ah well! it is easier, in these days, to imagine that than to imagine the Frenchman going to war without any protest from his wife and fellow countrywomen, or the British or German general embarked on his punitive expedition with the applause of his gentle daughters. And what matter, now, who ended war, or how, or who made the dismal streets gay and embellished the less comely lives among us, and established the unwritten. constitution of the Family Order, 'To everyone according to his need.'

And yet I think, in the bottom of my heart, that it does matter, for the sake of the unborn, whether we composed ourselves into this family life together because of the breath of an iceberg blowing over us, or because of a great illumination of illogical and immeasurable sisterly love.

PROSPECTING IN NEW GUINEA

BY ROBERT M. MACDONALD

NEW GUINEA, or Papua, as the largest island in the world is variously called, promises to be the Klondike of the future. Nev. finds of gold are being made daily in its vast, mysterious interior, and at present men from all parts of the world are converging on Port Moresby and Samarai, its chief ports, whence they will proceed up the rivers to the scenes of the latest discoveries. Yet gold has been found in New Guinea for the past thirty years, and prospectors dared its fierce cannibalistic tribes and pierced the mighty mountain ranges in its heart before the news of the great wealth of the Alaskan fields startled the world. But prospectors, then as now, did not

care

to develop mines; the early pioneers merely washed out the precious metal from the river beds and passed on, ever hoping to find deposits from which they might snatch a fortune in a day. And sometimes they nearly accomplished this feat; for on the famous Yodda Valley fields each man made over fifty ounces per day, and only the unreasoning hostility of the natives and deadly fevers made it impossible for them to continue working until their dreams were realized.

The Queensland Government, which administered the British part of the island, did not by any means encourage the adventurous gold-seeker. There were reasons for this attitude, some not easily understood but some prompted by the highest motives. Chief of the

I

latter was the desire to govern the country for its own people's good and, if possible, to allow the natives to develop it themselves, aided by such civilizing influences as education, trade, and missionary enterprise. But this influence did not extend beyond the coast and it was left to the prospector who despite warnings and very often strenuous opposition forced his way inland, to teach the savage tribes to respect the white man. In time those inland tribes did learn to respect the white man and showed that fact on every possible occasion by eating him so as to inherit his virtues!

New Guinea is a land of enormous possibilities. It is well watered by rivers, is blessed with rich soil, and contains, indigenous to the country, most natural tropical growths that are of value. The science of man has almost conquered the fevers which hang round the coastal belt and over the inland marshes, and the natives are becoming more tractable. Miningcamps are expanding into townships, roads and telegraph lines are being made, and possibly there may soon be railways. Samarai, on an island at the extreme southeast of the mainland, has already eclipsed Port Moresby as the chief port of the Possession, and it is fast becoming, in nature, a second Port Said or Thursday Island. From its busy wharves coasting steamers run regularly to the mouths of the Mambare, Kumusi, and Gira rivers on

the east coast. On the upper reaches and headwaters of those rivers are the great gold deposits now attracting the world's attention. The origin of the gold there baffles all explanation, as yet, but those who go to that region do not usually trouble themselves about that matter. Newcomers can always earn all their requirements easily around any existing camp, while those more daring and experienced can still find all the sensations they want in the more remote gorges and unknown creeks. The township of Tamata is the largest gold-fields town, but the old Yodda Valley camp still rivals it closely in extent of population, and probably the camps on the scenes of the new rushes, among the Albert Edward Ranges and further north in the old German territory, will soon outclass both. The prospector in those regions still trusts to his rifle for protection, quinine for health, and his luck for fortune; and if the first two do not fail, the third will not desert him.

II

Not very long ago a party of us set out from Tamata to prospect the foothills of the Owen Stanley Ranges. Most of us had had experience on all the chief fields of the world and we thought we could at least look after ourselves, although the news had just reached Tamata of the massacre of Macrae's party by the natives. We totaled seven and employed a dozen carrier boys' belonging to a timid. coastal tribe which had been half civilized by the missionaries. Our first week's journey was through country already known, but when we crossed the Ope River and the pestilential marshes left by its periodical overflows we broke fresh ground. We were now on the divide between the Ope and the Kumusi and were heading to hit the

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last-named river's headwaters farther up among the foothills. Birds Birds of paradise of gorgeous plumage and noisy parrots of all description flitted about everywhere. Wild pigs were abundant and fish were plentiful in all the streams. Native bees and leeches made life very unpleasant during the day, and at night mosquitoes and jigger fleas paid us unwelcome attention. The bee and the jigger were the worst, however; the former does not sting, but in its craving for salt it sucks deep into the perspiring skin and raises painful blisters thereon. The latter playfully burrows under the toe nails, when it gets a chance, and deposits eggs which hatch as if by magic. Very drastic measures have to be taken when the jigger flea finds a home. But despite everything, and by making detours to avoid native villages, we forced our way ahead, and one day found ourselves on the bank of a swiftly swiftly flowing stream which, doubtless, joined the Kumusi somewhere.

We sat that night in the smoke of our camp-fire so as to escape the ravages of the night pests, and to discuss matters. We had crossed a native pad during the afternoon and knew that a village could not be far away, but we had also struck 'good' gold in the bed of the waterway beside us, and we hoped to prove its value before we passed on.

'I fancy we are in the heart of the Papangi country now,' said Big Sam, as he kicked a centipede into the fire. 'It was reported they were seeing red when we left Tamata.'

'I suppose it is useless trying to make friends with them?' the Professor suggested.

Boston Bob laughed. 'A Papangi likes the white man,' he said, "but he likes him best roasted.'

'It was up about here that Macrae's

party was wiped out,' Sydney Charlie head gracing the top end of a bamboo

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None of us had ever known the Doctor to be of a revengeful nature and his words surprised us.

We were certainly an odd combination. The Professor was a New Zealander, highly cultured and of scientific training. He was as gentle-looking and as tough as Boston Bob and Big Sam were tough-looking but gentle. Boston Bob and Big Sam had been with me in Alaska and elsewhere. Sydney Charlie was a famous New Guinean pioneer, and Silent Ted was a man of mystery who very rarely spoke but who was always a sheet anchor in any emergency. While we were thinking, each deep in his own thoughts, our chief carrier came forward from the boys' fire and signified he wished to speak.

'Fire away,' someone told him, and he began.

'Me, John Livingstone Stanley Chalmers, mighty big chief down among Koitapu people in Port Moresby. Me Christian an' got good educate. Me no' eat white fellow nor any fellow

"Yes, John Livingstone Stanley Chalmers, we know all that,' Sydney Charlie interrupted. 'Cut out your family history and tell us what is troubling you.'

'Well, me smell Papangi fellow now. Me know him's smell. Me been up here before, chief carrier with other goldhunting fellows. They all gets heads stuck on poles by Papangi an' only me get away. Big village near here an' your heads will be on poles round the tabu dubu (sacred house) before mornin', if you no' get away.'

pole,' Boston Bob commented. 'But I know you don't mean to be funny, John L. S. Chalmers, although your words are.'

'We had better set about building a stockade,' suggested Big Sam. 'They could surround us among the trees and spear us without showing themselves.'

'No!' Silent Ted ejaculated. 'Papangis are water fighters; they'll come in their war-canoes. We'll go to them

'Nonsense, Ted; we are not looking for trouble,' the Professor broke inmuch to our regret, for Ted had never before been known to speak so much at a time.

After some discussion, however, we saw that Ted's advice was good. We could leave our camp, with logs inside our mosquito nets, and fires burning to show its position. The natives, as was their custom, would spear the camp from the water while we were nearer their village than they dreamed, and, with luck, we might be able to get hold of one of their tabu priests, if any stayed behind the raiding party. He would be a hostage whose presence with us would mean a lot, for well we knew the strange tabu law of the natives: He who touches anything tabu becomes tabu himself, and this is often extremely awkward. Of course we did not doubt that the people of the village were well aware of our proximity. Very soon we decided upon our plan of action, and, leaving our fire heaped high with logs, we made toward the village, keeping in the thick of the dense vegetation and about a hundred feet away from the river. Our carriers - excepting the chief - were paralyzed with fear and ready to run at the first sign of danger.

III

We were greatly surprised at the 'I don't seem to fancy my handsome silence, for usually the sound of native

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