PLATE VII.
SELF, WITH NONUYA TRIBE (Note Doorway behind me)
MUENANE TRIBE
The interior with its pointed roof resembles, as Robuchon remarked, a circus at a country fair. The central space is usually kept clear, and is used by the children as a playing-ground what time it is not required for more serious tribal business, such as dancing or a tobacco palaver. The far end of the house—where there is usually another small entrance—is the portion reserved for the chief and his family. As a rule it is open, but I have seen it matted off in some Witoto houses. Neither the Boro nor the Witoto indulge in the cubicles of palm-leaf thatch mentioned by Wallace in Uaupes houses,[29] nor are their habitations divided into two, with a small chamber at the end, as described by Koch-Grünberg in Tuyuka houses.[30] Each family has its own fire, but that is the only distinction, though on the lower Apaporis mats of beaten palm-leaf are used to form a sort of booth for each family. Such mats, duriei as the Witoto call them, are also employed in some houses for the protective purpose of securing the entrance.
Fig. 5.
A A A, posts. B, fire. C C C, hammocks. D D, Wall.
The Apaporis Indians also make shelves or platforms on which they sleep, but all the other Issa-Japura tribes use the hammock slung about 2½ feet from the ground. One is hung for every man adjacent to his family fire—almost over it in fact. A second, placed rather less advantageously, in local opinion, belongs to his wife; while a third may be set between the two, close under the sloping thatch, for the children, when they are not asleep on the rough floor of uncovered earth. The family possessions are stored in places on the rafters overhead along with the hammocks, cooking-pots, and baskets with dried fish or smoked meat, the cassava-squeezer and personal treasures.
The chief has no other house, but any tribesman with a wish for one can build a small house for himself and his family in the bush, though he still retains his right to a corner in the common dwelling of the tribe. A temporary shelter is easily contrived by lashing poles to four trees, some seven or eight feet above the ground. On this frame-work branches for rafters and palm-leaves for thatch are quickly adjustable. This is the ordinary way of preparing a sleeping-place in the forest, and is known among the rubber-gatherers as a rancho, but the Indians’ private houses are constructed more securely, and more like miniature editions of the central tribal house, although in this case no wall whatever supports the sloping roof as a rule. These may be called their country homes, and they may be perhaps as much as two days’ journey from the great house of assembly.
At ordinary times there will be possibly from fifty to sixty people in the tribal house, but on the occasion of any festivity as many as two hundred will crowd in, all as by right entitled. What the atmosphere is like on those occasions may better be imagined than described. I invariably slept in native houses, and never found them other than very dark, very hot at night, and full of smoke, for which there is no outlet, chimneys being unknown luxuries with most of the tribes. Some of the Indians on the Apaporis contrive an arrangement that permits the smoke to disappear, and the Kuretu make what is almost a chimney-cowl by means of an overhanging portion of the topmost thatch above a small opening;[31] but in the ordinary Boro or Witoto house there is nothing to disperse the smoke from the wood fires that, it must be remembered, are never extinguished. These tribes have no means of making fire. It is therefore a matter of vital importance that it should never be permitted to die out. Did such an untoward accident occur the household would be fireless till live embers were obtained from some friendly neighbour.