160 BUKEAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [bull. 43 



spends to this rustic outside. Three pieces of wood, which touch at the ends 

 and which are placed in a triangle, or rather equally distant from each other, 

 take up almost all the middle of the temple. These pieces are on fire and burn 

 slowly. A savage, whom they call the keeper of the temple, is obliged to tend 

 the fire and prevent its going out. If it is cold he may liave his fire apart, but 

 he is not allowed to warm himself at that which burns in honor of the sun. 

 This keeper was also at the feast, at least I saw him not ; and his brands made 

 such a smoke that it blinded us. 



As to ornaments, I saw none, nor absolutely anything that could make me 

 know that I was in a temple. I saw only three or four chests placed irregu- 

 larly, in which there were some dry bones, and upon the ground some wooden 

 heads, a little better wi'ought than the two eagles on the roof. In short, if I 

 had not found a fire here I should have thought that this temple had been a long 

 time abandoned or that it had been plundered. Those cones wrapped up in skins, 

 which some relations speak of; those bodies of the chiefs ranged in a circle in a 

 round temple, terminating in a kind of dome; that altar, etc.; I saw notliing of 

 all this. If things were thus in times past, they are very much changed since." 



Perhaps also, for we ought to condemn nobody, but when there is no way 

 to excuse them ; perhaps, I say, that the neighborhood of the French made the 

 Natchez fear that the bodies of their chiefs and everything that was most 

 precious in their temple were in some danger if they did not convey them to 

 another place, and that the little attention they have at present to guard this 

 temple proceeds from its being deprived of what it contained most sacred in the 

 opinion of these people. It is true, notwithstanding that against the wall, 

 over against the door, there was a table, the dimensions of which I did not 

 take the pains to measure, because I did not suspect it to be an altar. I have 

 been assured since that it is 3 feet high, 5 long, and 4 wide. 



I have been further informed that they make a little fire on it with the 

 bark of oak, and that it never goes out; which is false, for there was no fire 

 on it, nor any appearance of there ever having been any made. They say also 

 that four old men lie by turns in the temple, to keep in this fire; that he who 

 is on duty must not go out for the eight days of his watch ; that they carefully 

 take the burning ashes of the pieces that burn in the midst of the temple, to 

 put upon the altar ; that twelve men are kept to furnish the bark ; that there 

 are marmosets of wood, and a figure of a rattlesnake likewise of wood, which 

 they set upon the altar, and to which they pay great honors. That when the 

 chief dies, they bury him directly ; that when they judge his flesh is consumed, 

 the keeper of the temple takes the bones up, washes them clean, wraps them in 

 whatever they have most valuable, and puts them in great baskets made of 

 canes, which shut very close; that he covers these baskets very neatly with 

 skins of roebucks, and places them before the altar, where they remain till the 

 death of the reigning chief; that then he incloses these bones in the altar 

 itself, to make room for the last dead, 



I can say nothing on this last article, only that I saw some bones in one or 

 two chests, but they made not half a human body ; that they appeared to be 

 very old, and that they wei-e not on the table which they say is the altar. As 

 to the other article, first, as I was in the temple only by day, I know not what 

 passes in it at night ; second, there was no keeper in the temple when I visited 

 it. I very well saw, as I said before, that there were some marmosets or 

 grotesque figures; but I observed no figure of a serpent. 



As to what I have seen in some relations — that this temple is hung with 

 tapestry and the floor covered with cane mats ; that they put in it whatever 

 they have that is handsomest, and that they bring every year hither the first 



" These details probably refer to the Taensa temple. 



