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 zemz, 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: “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 zemz 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 
