Having again covered ten miles, as nearly as he could judge, he swung round to the southwest.  A minute or two later he came to the largest open space he had yet seen, clear of undergrowth as well as of trees.  There were no huts upon it, and at first he saw no sign of men; but all at once Rodier cried that there was a ladder against one of the trees on the farther side of the clearing.  Flying towards it, and descending until the aeroplane was level with the tree-top, Smith was amazed to see a brown woman, with a brown baby under her arm, scuttling down the ladder towards the ground.  At the same time he became aware that there were ladders against many of the trees in the neighbourhood, and women and children were descending by them, showing all the marks of terror.  He had come upon a collection of the curious tree-houses, sixty or seventy feet from the ground, which some of the islanders inhabit.  The terrified people when they reached the ground fled into the forest.  There was no man among them, which led Smith to suspect that the men were either hunting for food, or were perhaps fighting with the castaways.  Instead of returning directly to the camp, therefore, he pursued his flight across the forest in the same direction in which the startled natives had run.  Now for the first time he wished that he could have had a silent engine, for then his ears might have given the information which failed his eyes.  Though he flew to and fro for some time in the vicinity of the tree-houses, he discovered no other break in the forest; and the impossibility of knowing what was going on beneath that vast screen of foliage began to affect him with hopelessness of success.

He wished it were possible to descend in the clearing, and continue his search on the ground.  The appearance of the aeroplane was so terrifying to the islanders that he need fear no opposition to his landing.  But the idea occurred to him only to be at once dismissed.  When once among the trees, away from the aeroplane, he would be no longer sacrosanct.  Those islanders who had actually witnessed his descent might fear him as a denizen of the sky; but any others that met him in the forest would not be restrained by superstitious fear from, treating him as an enemy.  Further, having once involved himself in the obscure and pathless depths of the forest, he might wander for hours, or even days, without finding the aeroplane.  It was an impossible course of action.  Hopeless as he was becoming, he felt that he could do nothing better than persevere as he had begun; after all, he had as yet covered only a small wedge of the segment he had proposed to himself.

But he now found himself in a difficulty.  In the excitement of his recent discovery he had neglected to keep a watch upon the compass, and he was now at a loss to know the precise direction in which to steer.  He must certainly go to the east, but he could not tell whether he was north or south of the camp.  It occurred to him that by rising to a greater height he might probably be able to descry the camp, so he planed upwards until he attained an altitude of nearly two thousand feet, Rodier searching the country seawards through his binocular.