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22   St. Lucia 22.
[[underlined]] Station 214. [[/underlined]]
On Milette Ridge about 1/2 mile south of Dame Milette or 1/2 mi. south of Milette Bridge. [[strikethrough] Under [[/strikethrough]] In fungus on a log took 167 Staphs (Aleocharinae, black 76, red 91), a Forficulid, and many ants.
[[underlined]] Station 215. [[/underlined]]
1/4 mile south of Sta. 214, on same ridge. Under leaves and rubbish found only 1 Myriapod, 5 snapping ants, one other ant, and 4 termites.
The ridge from here on becomes very narrow, with exceedingly precipitous slopes on the sides. In places there was scarcely room to put our feet on the crest, and again the trees and vines were our salvation. We had traversed nearly two miles from Dame Milette when the ridge ran ubruptly into a rocky hill. It seemed impossible to scale it without considerable danger, so we decided to eat lunch and turn back. Even turning had to be carefully done on this knife-edge ridge. I took a [[underlined]] photograph [[/underlined]] of the party on the trail here with the abrupt drop on one side. A little farther back I had taken [[underlined]] another [[/underlined]] of a very large tree covered with bromeliads. I'm afraid it was out of focus.
We had lunch about 1:30 and started back to find a cross-trail to take us down to the
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Milette River. Box stopped several times along here to pick new ferns for his collection. He must have gotten a dozen species. As we topped the first knoll we kept down the most obvious ridge, but soon realized we had swung to the east and were on a strange ridge. We went back and tried the next one to the left. This was still not the right one. We finally found our trail of cut plants and trampled ground, and followed it. Then Leckie recognized a certain tree that we passed as one we had seen [[double underlined]] since [[/underlined]] lunch! This caused a furor, and we got out the compass to check. Sure enough we had circled around on the knoll and followed back to the south! The natives were unconvinced but finally agreed to go with us. We took the direction we knew we should be following but failed to find the right ridge. As it was now four o'clock we decided to strike down to the Roseau River, and follow the trail from there to Dame Milette.
We got down to a small stream and followed it for nearly two hours. It was rough going, and Box and Leckie were wearing light tennis shoes which didn't get any grip on the wet rocks. It was raining lightly almost continually from 3 to 6:30, and it sprinkled once or twice during the night.