The next day I could get out of my hammock, though I could not stand or walk without the aid of two women, who took me over to a man I later found to be the chief of the tribe. He was well-fed, and by his elaborate dress was distinguished from the rest of the men. He had a very pleasant, good-natured smile, and almost constantly displayed a row of white, sharp-filed teeth. This smile gave me some confidence, but I very well knew that I was now living among cannibal Indians, whose reputation in this part of the Amazon is anything but flattering. I prepared for the new ordeal without any special fear—my feelings seemed by this time to have been pretty well exhausted and any appreciation of actual danger was considerably reduced as a result of the gamut of the terrors which I had run.
I addressed the Chief in the Portuguese language, which I had learned during my stay at Floresta headquarters, and also in Spanish but he only shook his head; all my efforts were useless. He let me know in a friendly manner that my hammock was to be my resting-place and that I would not be molested. His tribe was one that occupied an almost unknown region and had no connection with white men or Brazilians or people near the river. I tried in the course of the mimical conversation to make him understand that, with six companions from a big Chief's maloca (meaning Coronel da Silva and the Floresta headquarters), I had penetrated into the woods near this mighty Chief's maloca,—here I pointed at the Chief—that the men had died from fever and I was left alone and that luckily, I had found my way to the free men of the forest (here I made a sweeping movement with my hands). He nodded and the audience was over. I was led back to my hammock to dream and eat, and dream again.
Although the Chief and his men presented an appearance wholly unknown to me, yet it did not seem to distract me at the first glance, but as my faculties slowly returned to their former activity, I looked at them and found them very strange figures, indeed. Every man had two feathers inserted in the cartilage of his nose; at some distance it appeared as if they wore moustaches. Besides this, the Chief had a sort of feather-dress reaching half way down to his knees; this was simply a quantity of mutum feathers tied together as a girdle by means of plant-fibres. The women wore no clothing whatever, their only ornamentation being the oval wooden piece in the lower lip and fancifully arranged designs on face, arms, and body. The colours which they preferred were scarlet and black, and they procured these dyes from two plants that grew in the forest near by. They would squeeze the pulp of the fruits and apply the rich-coloured juice with their fingers, forming one scarlet ring around each eye, outside of this a black and larger ring, and, finally, two scarlet bands reaching from the temples to the chin.
There were probably sixty-five families in this communal hut, all having their little households scattered throughout the place without any separating partitions whatever. The many poles which supported the roof formed the only way of distinguishing the individual households. The men strung their hammocks between the poles in such a way that they formed a triangle, and in the middle of this a fire was always going. Here the women were doing the cooking of game that the men brought in at all times of the day. The men slept in the hammocks, while the women were treated less cavalierly; they slept with their children on the ground under the hammocks around the little family triangle. As a rule they had woven mats made of grass-fibre and coloured with the juices of the urucu plant and the genipapa, but in many instances they had skins of jaguars, and, which was more frequent, the furs of the three-toed sloths. These were placed around the family fire, directly under the hammocks occupied by the men. In these hammocks the men did most of the repair work on their bows and arrows when necessary, here they fitted the arrow heads to the shafts, in fact, they spent all their time in them when not actually hunting in the forests.
The hospitality of my friends proved unbounded. The Chief appointed two young girls to care for me, and though they were not startling from any point of view, especially when remembering their labial ornaments and their early developed abdominal hypertrophies, they were as kind as any one could have been, watching me when I tried to walk and supporting me when I became too weak. There was a certain broth they prepared, which was delicious, but there were others which were nauseating and which I had to force myself to eat. I soon learned that it was impolite to refuse any dish that was put in front of me, no matter how repugnant. One day the Chief ordered me to come over to his family triangle and have dinner with him. The meal consisted of some very tender fried fish which were really delicious; then followed three broiled parrots with fried bananas which were equally good; but then came a soup which I could not swallow. The first mouthful almost choked me,—the meat which was one of the ingredients tasted and smelled as if it had been kept for weeks, the herbs which were used were so bitter and gave out such a rank odour that my mouth puckered and the muscles of my throat refused to swallow. The Chief looked at me and frowned, and then I remembered the forest from which I had lately arrived and the starvation and the terrors; I closed my eyes and swallowed the dish, seeking what mental relief I could find in the so-called auto-suggestion.
But I had the greatest respect for the impulsive, unreasoning nature of these sons of the forest. Easily insulted, they are well-nigh implacable. This incident shows upon what a slender thread my life hung. The friends of one moment might become vindictive foes of the next.
Besides the head-Chief there were two sub-Chiefs, so that in case of sickness or death there would be always one regent. They were plainly distinguished by their dress, which consisted mainly of fancifully arranged feather belts of arara, mutum, and trumpeter plumes covering the shoulders and abdomen. These articles of dress were made by young women of the tribe: women who wanted to become favourites of the Chief and sub-Chiefs. They often worked for months on a feather dress and when finished presented it to the particular Chief whose favour they desired.
The Chiefs had several wives, but the tribesmen were never allowed to take more than one. Whenever a particularly pretty girl desired to join the household of the Great Chief or of a sub-Chief, she set to work and for months and months she made necklaces of alligator teeth, peccary teeth, and finely carved ivory nuts and coloured pieces of wood. She also would weave some elaborate hammock and fringe this with the bushy tails of the squirrels and the forest-cats, and when these articles were done, she would present them to the Chief, who, in return for these favours, would bestow upon her the great honour of accepting her as a wife.
There seemed to be few maladies among these people; in fact, during the five weeks I spent with them, I never saw a case of fever nor of anything else. When a person died the body was carried far into the woods, where a fire was built, and it was cremated. The party would then leave in a hurry and never return to the same spot; they were afraid of the Spirit of the Dead. They told me that they could hear the Spirit far off in the forests at night when the moon was shining.