第115章

The owners appear to have chosen all the most picturesque sites--tracts of level ground at the foot of wooded heights, or little havens with bits of white sandy beach--as if they had an appreciation of natural beauty.Most of the dwellings are conical huts, with walls of framework filled in with mud and thatched with palm leaves, the broad eaves reaching halfway to the ground.

Some are quadrangular, and do not differ in structure from those of the semi-civilised settlers in other parts; others are open sheds or ranchos.They seem generally to contain not more than one or two families each.

At the first house, we learned that all the fighting men had this morning returned from a two days' pursuit of a wandering horde of savages of the Pararauate tribe, who had strayed this way from the interior lands and robbed the plantations.A little further on we came to the house of the Tushaua, or chief, situated on the top of a high bank, which we had to ascend by wooden steps.There were four other houses in the neighbourhood, all filled with people.A fine old fellow, with face, shoulders, and breast tattooed all over in a cross-bar pattern, was the first strange object that caught my eye.Most of the men lay lounging or sleeping in their hammocks.The women were employed in an adjoining shed making farinha, many of them being quite naked, and rushing off to the huts to slip on their petticoats when they caught sight of us.Our entrance aroused the Tushaua from a nap;after rubbing his eyes he came forward and bade us welcome with the most formal politeness, and in very good Portuguese.He was a tall, broad-shouldered, well-made man, apparently about thirty years of age, with handsome regular features, not tattooed, and a quiet good-humoured expression of countenance.He had been several times to Santarem and once to Para, learning the Portuguese language during these journeys.He was dressed in shirt and trousers made of blue-checked cotton cloth, and there was not the slightest trace of the savage in his appearance or demeanour.I was told that he had come into the chieftainship by inheritance, and that the Cupari horde of Mundurucus, over which his fathers had ruled before him, was formerly much more numerous, furnishing 300 bows in time of war.They could now scarcely muster forty; but the horde has no longer a close political connection with the main body of the tribe, which inhabits the banks of the Tapajos, six days' journey from the Cupari settlement.

I spent the remainder of the day here, sending Aracu and the men to fish, while I amused myself with the Tushaua and his people.Afew words served to explain my errand on the river; he comprehended at once why white men should admire and travel to collect the beautiful birds and animals of his country, and neither he nor his people spoke a single word about trading, or gave us any trouble by coveting the things we had brought.He related to me the events of the preceding three days.The Pararauates were a tribe of intractable savages, with whom the Mundurucus have been always at war.They had no fixed abode, and of course made no plantations, but passed their lives like the wild beasts, roaming through the forest, guided by the sun;wherever they found themselves at night-time there they slept, slinging their bast hammocks, which are carried by the women, to the trees.They cross the streams which lie in their course in bark canoes, which they make on reaching the water, and cast away after landing on the opposite side.The tribe is very numerous, but the different hordes obey only their own chieftains.The Mundurucus of the upper Tapajos have an expedition on foot against them at the present time, and the Tushaua supposed that the horde which had just been chased from his maloca were fugitives from that direction.There were about a hundred of them--including men, women, and children.Before they were discovered, the hungry savages had uprooted all the macasheira, sweet potatoes, and sugarcane, which the industrious Mundurucus had planted for the season, on the east side of the river.As soon as they were seen they made off, but the Tushaua quickly got together all the young men of the settlement, about thirty in number, who armed themselves with guns, bows and arrows, and javelins, and started in pursuit.They tracked them, as before related, for two days through the forest, but lost their traces on the further bank of the Cuparitinga, a branch stream flowing from the northeast.The pursuers thought, at one time, they were close upon them, having found the inextinguished fire of their last encampment.The footmarks of the chief could be distinguished from the rest by their great size and the length of the stride.A small necklace made of scarlet beans was the only trophy of the expedition, and this the Tushaua gave to me.

I saw very little of the other male Indians, as they were asleep in their huts all the afternoon.There were two other tattooed men lying under an open shed, besides the old man already mentioned.One of them presented a strange appearance, having a semicircular black patch in the middle of his face, covering the bottom of the nose and mouth, crossed lines on his back and breast, and stripes down his arms and legs.It is singular that the graceful curved patterns used by the South Sea Islanders are quite unknown among the Brazilian red men; they being all tattooed either in simple lines or patches.The nearest approach to elegance of design which I saw was amongst the Tucunas of the Upper Amazons, some of whom have a scroll-like mark on each cheek, proceeding from the corner of the mouth.The taste, as far as form is concerned, of the American Indian, would seem to be far less refined than that of the Tahitian and New Zealander.