74 THE TEOPICAL WORLD. 



admire. The thatch is of the leaf of some one of the numerous 

 palms so well adapted to the purpose, and is laid on with great 

 compactness and regularity. The walls, which are very low, 

 are formed also of palm-thatch, but so thick and so well bound 

 together that neither arrow nor bullet will penetrate it. At 

 the gable end is a large doorway, from the top of which hangs 

 a palm mat, supported by a pole during the day, and let down 

 at night. A smaller door at the semicircular end is the private 

 entrance of the chief, to whom this part of the house exclu- 

 sively belongs. The furniture consists principally of hammocks, 

 made of string twisted from the fibres of the leaves of the 

 Mauritia flexuosa, of pots and cooking utensils made of baked 

 clay, and of great quantities of small! saucer-shaped baskets. 



Tattooing is very little practised by the Uaupes ; they all, 

 however, have a row of circular punctures along the arm, and 

 one tribe, the Tucanos, are distinguished from the rest by three 

 vertical blue lines on the chin. They also pierce the lower 

 lip, through which they hang three little threads of white 

 beads. All the tribes bore their ears, and wear in them little 

 pieces of grass ornam^ented with feathers. The Cobeus alone 

 expand the hole to so large a size that a bottle cork could be 

 inserted. The dead are almost always buried in the houses^ 

 but several tribes have the horrid custom of disinterring the 

 corpse about a month after the funeral, and putting it in a 

 great oven over the fire till all the volatile parts are driven off 

 v^^ith an intolerable stench. The black carbonaceous mass 

 which remains is then pounded into a fine powder and mixed in' 

 several large vats of caxiri, or maize-beer. This- is drunk by 

 the assembled company till all is finished, for they imagine that 

 thus the virtues of the' deceased will be transmitted to the 

 drinkers. 



The belief, which is also common among the Negroes, that 

 death in the prime of life does not proceed from a natural 

 cause, but is owing to the evil practices of some enemy, leads 

 to the same fatal consequences. Some poison given at a fes- 

 tival in a bowl of caxiri is generally used to avenge the dead ; 

 this is of course again retaliated — on perhaps the wrong party — 

 and thus a long succession of murders may result from what at 

 first was a mere groundless suspicion. 



The Macus, one of the lowest and most uncivilised tribes of 



