72 THE TEOPIOAL WORLD. 



roots and branches ! When the Indians wish to surprise a 

 hostile horde they bind several canoes together and, concealing 

 them under a covering of herbs and foliage, thus imitate the 

 natural floats of the Orinoco. 



Lurking, like murderous reptiles, under a canopy of verdure, 

 the current carries them towards the unsuspecting objects of 

 their stratagem, and they send forth the poisoned dart ere the 

 enemy is aware of their approach. How happy might all these 

 nations be if they would but apply to the arts of peace and im- 

 provement, the intelligence they waste upon the purposes of 

 war ! 



Where the hordes are so small and the causes of destruction 

 so great, it cannot be wondered at that whole tribes die away 

 like single families, and come to be numbered among the beings 

 of the past. Thus the Atures, who gave their name to the far- 

 famed cataracts of the Upper Orinoco, are now no more, and, 

 strange to say, the last words of their language were heard from 

 the lips not of the last survivor of their race, but from those of 

 a parrot. The Atures are also interesting from their careful 

 mode of sepulture, in a burial cavern thus described by 

 Humboldt : ' The most remote part of the valley is covered by 

 a thick forest. In this shady and solitary spot, on the declivity 

 of a steep mountain, the cavern of Atariupe opens itself. It is 

 less a cavern than a jutting rock in which the waters have 

 scooped a vast hollow ; when, in the ancient revolutions of our 

 planet, they attained that height. We soon reckoned in the 

 tomb of a whole extinct tribe nearly six hundred skeletons, well 

 preserved, and so regularly placed that it would have been 

 difficult to make an error in their number. Every skeleton 

 reposes in a sort of basket made of the petioles of the palm 

 tree. These baskets, which the natives call mapures, have the 

 form of a square bag ; their sizes are proportioned to the age of 

 the dead ; there are some for infants cut off the moment of 

 their birth : we saw them from ten inches to three feet long, 

 the skeletons in them being bent together. The bones, not 

 one of which is wanting, have been prepared in three different 

 manners, either whitened in the air and the sun, or dyed red 

 with arnatto, or, like real mummies, varnished with odoriferous 

 resins, and enveloped in leaves of the heliconia or plantain tree. 

 The Indians related to us that the fresh corpse is placed in damp 



