222 CAMPS IN THE CARIBBEES. 



dently artificial, begrimed with smoke, as though they 

 had been used as fireplaces. We found no living 

 things but bats and tarantulas ; the former flew about 

 in great numbers. While my companions were en- 

 gaged in the farther end of the cave, I groped among 

 the loose fragments of stone near the mouth, where, 

 one of the men told me, an Indian chair had been 

 found some fifteen years before. Carefully displacing 

 the stone chippings, I at last found what seemed to be 

 an image of stone ; but scraping with a knife revealed 

 that it was of wood. It was a tortoise, four inches 

 long and two and one-half broad, curiously carved. 

 Two holes, a quarter of an inch in diameter, are bored 

 through back and breast ; the back, upper part of the 

 head, and the throat, are covered with incised figures, 

 and the eyes carefully carved hollows, as if for the 

 reception of some foreign substance. 



There is little doubt that this image once belonged 

 to an Indian living many years ago. I choose to con- 

 sider it a zemi, having as my authority the account 

 given in Irving's " Columbus," of the finding of simi- 

 lar objects by the Spaniards, among the natives of 

 Haiti. Speaking of their religion, he says : w They 

 believed in one Supreme Being, who inhabited the 

 sky, who was immortal, omnipotent, and invisible. 

 They never addressed their worship directly to him, 

 but to inferior deities, called zemes, a kind of messen- 

 gers or mediators. Each cacique, each family and 

 each individual, had a particular zcmi as a tutelary 

 deity, whose image, generally of a hideous form, was, 

 placed about their houses, carved on their furniture, 

 and sometimes bound to their foreheads when they 

 went to battle. They believed their zemes to be 



