280 
One of the Most Beautiful of Tbibes. 
smoked fish, etc. that the bucks and buckeens had brought forward. 
Like the pedlar at the annual fair of a country town around whom crowds 
of strong and lusty peasant girls collect and glance with wistful eyes at 
all the glittering but worthless gew-gaws spread before him, so stood my 
brother behind his many boxes filled with motley-coloured glass beads, 
knives, scissors and other trifles surrounded by the light brown but 
beautifully developed buckeens, who gazed with longing looks upon the 
tempting beads, the only articles that almost all of them wanted. The 
woman will sell everything for beads, which constitute her sole finely, 
while the man, like a peacock, will decorate himself with the most 
motley coloured plumage of every feathered occupant of the forest. The 
greatest ornament of the Macusi Indian woman — for the acquirement of 
which she redoubles her exertions in the field, because all the fruits of 
it that are not wanted in the household can be sold by her to procure 
these showy things if nothing else is required — are the wide strings of 
beads which she wears wound around her legs and arms, and out of 
which she makes her apron-belt. 
800. Without doubt the Macusis, whose district includes the 
savannahs of the Rupununi, the Parima, and the mountain chains of 
the Päcaraima and Canuku, belong to the most beautiful tribes of 
Guiana, just as they likewise constitute at the present time one of its 
most numerous ones. Their skin colour, like that of the Arawaks, is 
tolerably light, and with it their features have something uncommonly 
gentle and pleasant which is more or less enhanced by the Roman, Greek 
oi- Mulatto nose. Their figure is slender and generally well proportioned. 
The men wear their hair almost always short, the women on the contrary 
having it nicely tidied and hanging down over the neck and shoulders or 
else rolled together in long plaits wound on top of the head. Their 
speech is something unusually euphonious and has much resemblance to 
French, the largest number of their words ending in — ong, — eng, or 
— ang. /Ihat they are an unusually peaceable tribe is already confirmed 
by the circumstance that all the slave raids by the Caribs and 
other tribes were made in the territory of the Macusis, as in more 
recent times similar raids were made by the Brazilians. Peaceable and 
harmless as is the tribe, it showed itself equally as obliging, hospitable, 
and industrious during our lengthy stay in its settlements, and it 
possesses one rare superiority shared by only a few others, its great love 
of order and cleanliness. Polygamy is certainly practised, though one 
finds it but very rarely. They also colour their face and body thickly 
with Bignonia Chica and Genipa Americana paint; the women, who are 
not less indifferent to finery, particularly do this and try to increase 
their natural beauty as much as possible by external artificial means, in 
which connection they set an especially high value upon their long and 
beautiful brilliant black hair which one always finds cleanly combed and 
anointed with crab oil. Their ear lobes and, among the men. the nasal 
septum, were bored. In the holes the men wore the finger-long round 
little bits of stick or thin pieces of cane, and I noticed among both' 
sexes, without exception, a small round opening in the under lip through 
