To make a hammock a woman takes a length of this fibre string and turns it round, backwards and forwards between two posts set in the earthen floor of the maloka. Cross strings of the same material are then tied at the regulation intervals and knotted across, from string to string, to the opposite side. No implement of any kind is used; the two posts are the only framework, and the whole construction is carried out entirely by the women’s fingers without any artificial aid.
The cassava-squeezer, that essential complement to an Indian household, is another plaited or basket-work article. The squeezer, which is common to the Boro and all the tribes north or south, except the Witoto, the Muenane, and the Nonuya, consists of a long cylinder with a loop at both ends. One is attached to a rafter, and the other to a stout stick, on which a woman sits, and thereby pulls upon the cylinder. The manioc is inserted through the open end before the weight is applied, and the elastic structure widens out to permit the soaked and grated roots to be packed in, till it resembles nothing so much as a well-filled Christmas stocking; but when pressure is brought to bear on the lower end the cylinder gradually elongates, and thereby contracts, crushing the roots to a pulp, from which the poisonous juice drains away.
The material used to make these squeezers appears to be a species of cane, but is said to be the bark of a palm tree.[107] It is cut into narrow strips and closely plaited into an elastic bottle some seven to ten feet long, and not more than about six inches wide when open. Instead of this cylinder the Witoto use a long web, a rectangular strip about ten inches wide of plaited bark-fibre, about an inch wide. This they wind round the grated manioc after the manner that putties are adjusted on the leg. The tighter they twist the pliable web the greater the pressure upon the crushed roots, and the juice is thus wrung out of them.
The grater that is used to scrape the manioc roots, before they are placed in the squeezer, is a wooden implement made by the Indian women themselves.[108] It is a flat oval. The one in the illustration measures 16½ inches by 5¾ inches. The wood is of a bamboo type set with short black palm-spines about an eighth of an inch apart, thicker at one end than the other, but arranged in no regular pattern. These spines are fixed into the wood and project about an eighth of an inch above it. Those in which quartz stones are inserted instead of spines are a valuable commercial commodity north of the Japura.
PLATE XXV.
OKAINA GROUP
Note Coca pestle and mortar.
GROUP OF OKAINA WOMEN
I never saw manioc crushed, as Robuchon described, with a pestle and mortar; but these articles are in frequent use, especially for the preparation of coca and tobacco, so they are items of importance in an Indian inventory. A mortar is easily improvised from the hollowed trunk of a tree, and such a small mortar, with a long heavy pounder, is shown on the right of the photograph of a group of Okaina Indians. It is being used to pound coca ([Plate XXV.]). The pestles are made of some heavy wood, such as red wood or mahogany, and the lower trunk of the peach palm,[109] or a block of ironwood makes a very solid mortar. The peach-palm trunk is hollow, that is to say, it has a very hard shell filled with soft pith that can be scraped out with little difficulty.[110] Some of these mortars are of great size. Spruce gives the measurements as five to six feet high, but none I saw were more than four feet.