Darkness is full of mysterious horrors to the Indian, nor can one wonder that he fills with imaginary demons the weird and terrifying solitudes of the bush by night. The children are openly afraid of the dark, because of the tigers that may then be prowling about, let alone less substantial perils. Adults are not so frank with regard to their fears, but as a matter of course all occupations cease at sun-down, and every one makes for the sheltered warmth of the maloka. There, by the flickering firelight, after the contents of the family hot-pot have been discussed, long tales are told. First one and then another takes up the burden of recital. The chatter dies slowly, maybe it will linger on by the fire of some verbose story-teller, till the chill of coming dawn brings the sleepers from their hammocks to stir the smouldering embers into a blaze, and to gather round them waiting for daybreak to dispel the evil agents of the night.

The tales are endlessly long, and so involved that they are utterly unintelligible to the stranger until they have been repeated many times. Then the drift of myth and tradition, the meaning of fable and story, may be broadly grasped. To win it comprehensively in detail is a matter of time, patience, and intimate knowledge of the speaker’s tongue. Moreover, the tales have such numerous variations, and are so grafted the one on to the other, according to the momentary fancy of the narrators, that it is exceedingly difficult to differentiate between a variant of a known story and one that may in its essentials have been hitherto unheard.

“It is,” postulates Dr. Rivers, “not the especially familiar and uniform which becomes the object of myth.”[374] The mythopoeic influence of that which is seldom seen would lead us to expect that among these Indians, sunk in “the gloom of an eternal under-world of trees,”[375] the heavenly bodies would play a prominent part in tribal folk-tale and myth. But so far as the stars are concerned this is not the case at all;[376] they seem to be ignored; and, as regards the sun and moon, it is the sun—contrary to usual tropical custom—that is the most important, the moon—as with more northern peoples—occupies the subordinate position of wife. Her inconstant appearances are accounted for by the suggestion mentioned in the previous chapter that she is sent periodically by the sun her husband to drive away the evil spirits of the night that await the stray or heedless loiterers in the forest thickets. But this protective character is denied to the moon by other tribes, and some South American Indians will hide young infants lest the moon should injure them.[377]

What I cannot but consider the most important of their stories are the many myths that deal with the essential and now familiar details of everyday life in connection with the manihot utilissima and other fruits. The tale that follows does not purport to be a literal translation of the myth as related to me, or in my hearing. I have merely attempted to put together, infinitely more concisely than any Indian raconteur would ever dream of doing, the various details of the local story and belief:

This story is utterly different from one Spruce heard from more northern tribes at Sao Gabriel. The BarrÉ story has it that a bird discovered to the Indians the use of the mandiocca, then a great and solitary tree. All the tribes came to procure the roots, and when none were left carried off branches; hence the varieties of mandiocca now grown.[380]

Deluge traditions are to be found among practically all the tribes. I repeatedly asked questions on this point, and invariably found, as other travellers had discovered previously elsewhere,[381] that the Indians would tell of a flood that drove their fathers in the long, long ago to seek refuge in canoes, for all the earth was under water. But though Mr. Joyce considers it “strange how this deluge myth not only pervades practically the whole of the Andean region of South America, but extends also to many regions in the northern portion of the Continent,” it must be remembered that inundations are frequent in these regions, and a great one probably occurs every few decades. It would only be strange were there no deluge myths. As Sir Everard im Thurn has so aptly put it, when “the Indian tells in his simple language the tradition of the highest flood which covered all the small world known to him, and tells how the Indians escaped it, it is not difficult to realise that the European hearer, theologically prejudiced in favour of Noah, … is apt to identify the two stories.”[382]

With the possible exception of the Eldorado fable, there is no South American legend that has excited so much interest and speculation as the story of the warrior women who in some mysterious forest fastness dwelt apart from men, cultivated masculine attributes, and destroying the male brought up the female progeny resultant from the yearly exception to their celibate rule,[383] to be women of the same stern pattern as their extraordinary selves. Some writers would make them a seventeenth century edition of the modern suffragette, rebel against the “tyranny” of man—and with certainly better reason for rebellion.[384] The story has been treated as mere Spanish romance,[385] or a mistake on the part of the invaders due to the custom of wearing the hair long among many of the tribes.[386] It has been taken to be a deliberate fabrication on the part of Pizarro to explain his failure, a temptation to which Sir Walter Raleigh himself also fell victim.[387] Be it what it may, the tale was told, the land known as the land of these women warriors, and their name of Amazons bestowed upon the great river. The tale of warrior women is, however, not confined to the forests of the Amazon. One comes therewith to the question of nomenclatory origin. The Baron de Santa-Anna Nery devotes the first ten pages of his Land of the Amazons to this discussion. It seems to be a case of where doctors disagree.[388] But at least the tale, Asiatic, African, or autochthonic, was localised here, and stories of feminine prowess in the field continued to be quoted even in the nineteenth century. Wallace himself mentions “traditions” said to be extant among the Indians themselves, of “women without husbands.”[389] This is no proof of the local existence at any time of celibate women warriors. The tradition may well exist, the only curiosity again would be if it did not. For three centuries at least the invading white man has talked of, and inquired for, a tribe of such warrior women. It takes less than this to start the most robust of folk-tales. A world agape like the Athenians of old for some new thing, some tale to vary the oft-told stories, does not require three centuries to adopt a novel romance. The question “do such things exist?” is not asked long before it ceases to be a question and becomes an assertion. The more positive the assertion the greater will be the wonder of the tale. When the wonder is sufficient it will be established as a current myth. I do not therefore deny that such a tale is told, or at least may be told, but for my own part I never heard mention of it. Spruce speaks of women assisting their men to repulse an attack on tribal head-quarters,[390] but no story of any woman fighting, or having done so at any time, was ever told me. Moreover it should not be forgotten in this connection that all weapons are strictly tabu to women.

A story that is prevalent throughout South America tells of a race of white Indians who sleep in the daytime, and only go abroad at night. This tale was laughed at when repeated at a recent meeting of the Royal Geographical Society, but it is certainly in existence among the tribes,[391] and Crevaux states that the Ouayana will not go near one river, “À cause des singuliers habitants qui habiteraient prÈs des sources … des Indiens aux chevaux blonds qui dorment le jour et marchent toute la nuit.”[392]

Of tales as to the reputed origin of any tribe I have no note, though when I cross-questioned a Boro tribe as to why a certain district was almost uninhabited, they told me that the reason was as follows:

The Amazonians have stories equivalent to many worldwide tales, such as that of the lion and the mouse, only in the forest version it is the jaguar who enacts the lion’s part, while the mouse is replaced by the ant, a liana serves instead of a net to keep the great beast captive, and there are other correspondingly local and numerous variations. The hare and the tortoise fable has its counterpart in the story of a race between the deer and the tortoise. The ramifications of this tale are most intricate. These stories are very dissimilar in detail, so far as I could gather, from their equivalents in the Old World, but in each case the same principle is evolved: by a widely different route Old and New reach eventually an identical goal.

There is a marked prevalence of animal stories, tales—and this is a point not to be overlooked—of the familiar forest beasts, the birds and the reptiles of everyday life. In these the birds and beasts have certain accepted characteristics, they stand in the Indian folk-tales as representing definite abstract ideas. Thus, as with us, the tortoise is crafty and slow; the ant and the bee are typical of industry. The snake, that is to say the poisonous snake, in Amazonian myth, as in Biblical story, represents evil, the evil eye. The tapir stands for blindness and stupidity, while cunning and deceit are represented by the dog. These bush dogs approximate to our fox, and like Reynard have sharp up-standing ears. They prowl round the maloka, and will clear off anything they can find, even in close vicinity to the house. The agouti, or capybara, takes with the Indian the place held in African folk-tales by the hare. He is the wittiest of beasts, can outmanoeuvre all the others, and is the practical joker of the forest. The boa-constrictor, unlike the poisonous snake, is not evil; it exemplifies the silent and the strong. The chattering parrot represents irresponsibility; it is a woman in disguise, and is certain in Indian animal tales to be noisy and unreliable, and probably will betray some secret. The peccary is for constancy, the hawk for cunning, the sloth for laziness, and the tiger for bravery. The monkey stands for tenacity of life, which is probably due to the fact that owing to constriction of the muscles its hold on a branch does not relax for some time after death.

These characteristics, however, do not appear to govern in any way the question of food tabu concerning the respective animals. On the contrary, the reasons alleged for such tabu often appear to be, if anything, opposed to what one would expect to find from the foregoing classification. It is the material, not the abstract characteristic with which the tabu deals. Moreover the tabu varies. Irrespective of those connected with birth, at certain times of the year there is a restriction, if it does not amount to an actual prohibition or a tabu, with regard to eating heavy meats. Simson assigns such avoidance to a belief current among Indians “that they partake of the nature of the animal they devour.” This is the case professedly for any tabu on foods for women with child, but the reason given to me for general restriction as regards, say, tapir flesh, was not that the eater would be affected by any characteristic of the animal, material or spiritual, but that the tapir meat if eaten at forbidden seasons was very bad, that is to say unhealthy, and would be the cause of certain skin diseases. It probably would be. Tiger meat, as already explained, is treated much as human flesh is treated. Apart from the tiger, the meat of larger game will, it is sometimes averred by other tribes, make the eater gross and unwieldy.[400] In connection with this question of big game and food, Spruce refers to a “superstition” among the Uaupes Indians that may be a possible survival of a totemic system, though he does not advance the theory. “How should we kill the stag?” they say, “he is our grandfather.”[401] However this may be with other language-groups, among those of the Issa-Japura regions there is no trace of any totemic system, except in so far as that boys and girls are named, as already stated, after birds and flowers respectively. Animal names are made use of occasionally, but only as names of contempt and ridicule. These Indians look upon all animals as enemies. To suggest that any animal is an ancestor would be the direst of insults to people who so strenuously try to avoid all likeness to the brute creation. One need only refer to such customs as the killing of one of twins, or depilation, to give the lie to any theory that would seek to trace in Boro story—for example—for sign of suggested descent from any eponymous animal. Relationship is traced indeed only so far as memory serves; that is to say the oldest man may relate how he remembers his grandfather telling who his grandfather’s father was. Also there are invariably tales of bygone chiefs, great warriors whose deeds and characters are outstanding enough to be remembered.

A story is told of a small fish that is to be found in these rivers which may be fact or may be fable. All Indians say that this fish is a parasite that will find its way into the intestines of human beings when they are bathing. This belief is noted elsewhere, and I merely refer to it here because it is so universally credited without—so far as I could ascertain—an atom of corroborative evidence.