Exploring the Aruka. 
119 
trusted acquaintance, a stranger, or some indifferent person to whom the 
pleasure of dancing had •alone impelled her, she fled “with the speed of a 
gazelle back to her original place immediately the first stamp sounded. 
A general shout on the part of the men brought the ball to a close. 
408. Besides this dance, the men, but these alone, performed several 
others which according to our ideas did not bear the most elegant of 
names, since they were named after animals whose antics or voices they 
sought to imitate. Thus they spoke of a monkey-, a sloth-, a bird-dance 
etc. Though at, the beginning these innocent amusements aroused the 
keenest interest bolth in myself, Mr. Glascott, and the others who saw 
them for the first time, this soon began to wane, because the dissolute 
rowdy dancers often continued them late into the night and banished 
sleep from camp. However here, as elsewhere, we had to miake the best 
of a bad job: the best a wise man can do when he can’t do otherwise. 
409. 1 had never as yet seen such an assemblage of people where 
hardly one was to be found without a scar due to some previous injury, 
whether owing to explosion — some rotten fire-arm purchased with col- 
onial covetousness, imported into Georgetown as trade, and received in 
payment for hired service — or to fractured bone, axe-cut, snake bite, en- 
counter with wild animals or to strife arising between man and man, 
and yet all were fairly well healed, and mostly without surgical assistance. 
I was especially struck with the case of a young man who as the result 
of the bite of a poisonous snake, Trigonocephalus atrox, had immediately 
cut off half the foot which had been bitten: the damage was so well re- 
paired that he only limped, almost unnoticeably . 
410. On June 10th my brother and his party arrived all right at 
Cumaka, and were heartily welcomed by everybody. After following the 
Aruka for thirteen miles he had reached the mouth of the Aruau. To 
become acquainted however with the upper course of the Aruka and at 
the same time to visit a Warrau settlement which was to be found higher 
he followed it up. Beyond the Aruau mouth the width of the Aruka had 
rapidly taken off, so that the former proud and mighty river now hardly 
measured 90 feet across : its banks were generally marshy and taken over 
solely by Euterpe and Manicaria while alt the same time its waters ap- 
peared so dark -black and muddy that one could hardly distinguish where 
the reflected picture of the trees and bushes fringing its sides commenced 
and the edges of the land ended. Late in the evening they reached the 
Warrau village that was occupied by 18 Indians, from whom he hired a 
few for transporting the corial over the unnavigahle places between the 
Aruka and Amaeura that had to be surmounted on the following day. A 
second, just as small a settlement, was situate still farther up and, ac- 
cording to the statements of the Indians, must be the last on the upper 
Aruka. From there, the residents maintained, the source of the river 
was to be found some 15 miles farther to the southward. 
411. Next morning they returned down the Aruka as far as the mouth 
of the Aruau and following the bed of the latter reached the portage by 
evening when they dragged the corial over to a small tributary of the 
Amaeura. The ground rose to a height of about 40 or 50 feet above the 
level of the stream where this range of hills, stretching from North-West 
to South-East, at the same time formed the watershed between the small 
tributaries of the Amaeura and Barium. The direction of the overland 
