While they hesitated, and none seemed willing to seize her, or to take her children from her, Father Gomez, who had just landed on his return from Javita, approached in haste, and commanded them to be separated. Guahiba clasped her children closer to her breast, and the Indians shrunk back.
"What!" thundered the monk: "will ye suffer this woman to steal two precious souls from heaven?—two members from our community? See ye not, that while she is suffered to approach them, there is no salvation for either mother or children?—part them, and instantly!"
The Indians, accustomed to his ascendancy, and terrified at his voice, tore the children of Guahiba once more from her feeble arms: she uttered nor word nor cry, but sunk in a swoon upon the earth.
While in this state, Father Gomez, with a cruel mercy, ordered her wounds to be carefully dressed: her arms and legs were swathed with cotton bandages; she was then placed in a canoe, and conveyed to a mission, far, far off, on the river Esmeralda, beyond the Upper Orinoco. She continued in a state of exhaustion and torpor during the voyage; but after being taken out of the boat and carried inland, restoratives brought her back to life, and to a sense of her situation. When she perceived, as reason and consciousness returned, that she was in a strange place, unknowing how she was brought there—among a tribe who spoke a language different from any she had ever heard before, and from whom, therefore, according to Indian prejudices, she could hope nor aid nor pity;—when she recollected that she was far from her beloved children;—when she saw no means of discovering the bearing or the distance of their abode—no clue to guide her back to it:—then, and only then, did the mother's heart yield to utter despair; and thenceforward refusing to speak or to move, and obstinately rejecting all nourishment, thus she died.
The boatman, on the river Atabapo, suspends his oar with a sigh as he passes the ROCK OF THE MOTHER. He points it out to the traveller, and weeps as he relates the tale of her sufferings and her fate. Ages hence, when these solitary regions have become the seats of civilization, of power, and intelligence; when the pathless wilds, which poor Guahiba traversed in her anguish, are replaced by populous cities, and smiling gardens, and pastures, and waving harvests,—still that dark rock shall stand, frowning o'er the stream; tradition and history shall preserve its name and fame; and when even the pyramids, those vast, vain monuments to human pride, have passed away, it shall endure, to carry down to the end of the world the memory of the Indian Mother.