THE BRIGHT EYES OF DANGER

The legend of the Lost Tribes has persisted for a great many years. From time to time strange tales come out of the African and South American jungles of wandering explorers, delirious from hunger and thirst, who have stumbled upon communities of fair haired, light skinned Indians, with aquiline Moses and peculiarly clear cut features. Allan Quartermain found them, and so have several others whose reports have never been substantiated. There is always a suspicion of fever, hallucination, or temporary derangement on the part of the eye witness that makes complete belief impossible.

Several months ago, a party set out for the interior of the Darien peninsula, once more bent on the ancient quest. For days and weeks they remained buried in a wilderness of swamp and jungle grass, with nothing to connect them to civilization but a small wireless outfit and the monotonously regular stretcher parties that bore their muttering burdens back to the hospital at Colon. Yesterday, however, came a radiogram. The leader of the expedition reported that of the eleven original members, three were still left in the party; they intended to continue their march in the morning.

The object for which all this hardship and disease is being undergone seems trivial in the extreme. It will make the race of men no happier to know that somewhere in the tangle of tollage that is the Darien peninsula there really is a band of fair haired, thin lipped natives. Science will be little the wiser, and the sum total of human knowledge will not be appreciably increased. The real explanation for this and for all such expeditions is only partly scientific curiosity; it is much more the insatiable longing of a certain type of intellect to penetrate farther into the unknown than any other living being has yet been. It is rash, reckless, and usually productive of little immediate good; but had it not been a moving force since the beginning of history, Vespucci had been an obscure Portuguese sailor, and the western prairies would still be the hunting ground of the coyote and the timber wolf.