Spruce, after seven months among the Uaupes Indians, “failed to catch a payé”[312] or see one at work. I attempted to get on terms with sundry of these gentlemen by an exhibition of my own “magic” powers, in the hope that I might elicit some comments, or hints of their own secrets. I made play with my eyeglass, and informed them that it was great medicine, and enabled me to see through a man. But though the tribesmen had on their own account attributed this faculty to my camera, the medicine-men were very sceptical of the eyeglass. Still I had better fortune than Spruce, for one day when I was with an Okaina tribe, a woman of my party went down with fever. She had a temperature of 103° to 104°, and the quinine with which I dosed her had no effect. There happened to be a great and noted medicine-man in the district, so they sent for him. The maloka, some fifty yards from wall to wall each way, was dark as pitch. Into the gloom rushed a frenzied figure. It was the medicine-man in a state of tremendous excitement. He passed his hands frantically all over the woman’s body. She lay rigid, and he was shaking with the intensity of his emotion. Never in my life have I seen a man so excited. If he were play-acting he believed most emphatically in his own play-acting. Then he filled his mouth with coca, and stooping over the moribund woman put his lips upon hers. Eager and trembling, he sucked up the contents of the woman’s mouth, then rushed out of the house and expectorated, emptying his mouth with his fingers. After this he announced that he had sucked away the evil spirit.
Next morning the woman was perfectly well.
I considered it the most extraordinary faith cure: but there was no burking the fact that a dying woman had been restored most miraculously to health. Certainly imagination goes very far in the curative process with a patient in Amazonia—as elsewhere,—but even allowing for this it was extraordinary.
Faith in the healing powers of the medicine-men is not confined to the tribesmen, for I knew one case of an Indian woman who had been married for years to a white man and lived in the rubber district. She fell ill, and her husband, instead of trusting to the white man’s remedies, insisted on sending for a medicine-man.
CHAPTER XV
Indian dances—Songs without meaning—Elaborate preparations—The Chief’s invitation—Numbers assembled—Dance step—Reasons for dances—Special dances—Dance staves—Arrangement of dancers—Method of airing a grievance—Plaintiff’s song of complaint—The tribal “black list”—Manioc-gathering dance and song—Muenane Riddle Dance—A discomfited dancer—Indian riddles and mimicry—Dance intoxication—An unusual incident—A favourite dance—The cannibal dance—A mad festival of savagery—The strange fascination of the Amazon.
Whatever of art there may be in the soul of the tribesman finds expression in the dance. It is the concert and the play, the opera, the ball, the carnival, and the feast of the Amazons, in that it gives opportunity for the æsthetic, artistic, dramatic, musical, and spectacular aspirations of the Indian’s nature. It is his one social entertainment, and he invites to it every one living in amity with him. Any excuse is enough for a dance, but nevertheless the affair is a serious business. The dance, like the tobacco palaver, is a dominant factor in tribal life. For it the Amazonian treasures the songs of his fathers, and will master strange rhymes and words that for him no longer have meaning; he only knows they are the correct lines, the phrases he ought to sing at such functions, because they always have been sung, they are the words of the time-honoured tribal melodies.[313] It is for these occasions that he fashions quaint dancing-staves and wonderful musical instruments, and dons all his treasured ornaments, while his wife paints her most dazzling skin costumes. He practises steps and capers, tutors his voice to the songs; meantime his children rehearse assiduously in the privacy of their forest playground, against the time when they too may take part in the tribal festivities.