Fig. 9.
The musician takes his stand between these drums and, with a wooden mallet headed with a knob of rubber, beats out his message or his tune. Altogether he has a range of four notes—two low ones on the female manguare, and two high ones on the male. On these he rings the changes with great rapidity, and produces a sound which, though not startlingly loud, has such penetrating qualities that it can be heard twenty miles away. He beats very quickly in short and long strokes, not unlike the Morse Code. By means of the manguare a skilled signaller can carry on a conversation as accurately as a telegraph operator at St. Martin’s-le-Grand, or a soldier with a heliograph—but how he does it is another secret of the Amazonian bush. When used for its proper purpose as signal drum, the Boro and the Okaina can carry on conversations upon almost any subject within their ken. Other tribes are only able to distinguish between a warning of danger and an invitation to a dance. Brown could use the drum for small matters—he could hurry the bearers out of the bush for example. He said there was no code, but that the signaller tried to represent the sound of words with the drum, and Indians invariably told me that they made the words with the drum. However, with a language dependent on inflection, as theirs unquestionably is, there must be a code of some description.
India-rubber, which has added a new and awful terror to the life of the forest Indian, is only employed by these tribes to make the drum mallet, used with the manguare, and the latex for depilatory purposes. The Witoto call the mallet ouaki, the drum is hugwe.
These great signal drums have designs worked upon them in which the organs associated with the presumed sex of the instrument are prominent; and, after the manner of the natives, both instruments are invariably distinguished internally with the proper sexual characters, the female drum having two breasts pendant inside.
Even in the construction of a small playing drum much time and ingenuity are expended. First an aeta palm[342] is selected, cut down, and a section of the trunk laboriously hacked off. This section in turn is carefully hollowed, until only a thin shell remains. Some tribes use a section of bamboo in place of the hollowed palm, but these never secure so fine an instrument or so fine a note as the palm trunk makes. Over the two ends of the cylinder dried monkey skin is tightly stretched—preferably that of the howler monkey, as it is popularly supposed to produce a louder and more rolling sound. Some tribes then fasten across one end of this drum a very tight cord, into the centre of which has been tied a fine sliver of wood. By this means two notes are obtained—the open note where nothing interferes with the vibrations of the drumhead, and the closed note where the vibrations of the splinter intersect those of the skin. A very inferior instrument is made with agouti skin over a bamboo cylinder. The drums made on the Napo River look very much like an English child’s toy drum, rather high and narrow, and, of course, made entirely without metal. The sides bulge slightly, and have crossed threads of fibre string. The vellum of the drumhead is kept in its place tautly by a close-fitting ring. These drums are usually decorated, and are objects of barter among many of the tribes. They are played with the fingers only, not with drumsticks or mallet.
CHAPTER XVII
The Indians’ magico-religious system—The Good Spirit and the Bad Spirit—Names of deities—Character of Good Spirit—His visit to earth—Question of missionary influence—Lesser subordinate spirits—Child-lifting—No prayer or supplication—Classification of spirits—Immortality of the soul—Land of the After-Life—Ghosts and name tabu—Temporary disembodied spirits—Extra-mundane spirits—Spirits of particularised evils—Spirits of inanimate objects—The jaguar and anaconda magic beasts—Tiger folk—Fear of unknown—Suspicions about camera—Venerated objects—Charms—Magic against magic—Omens.
Some travellers and writers have asserted that the Indian has no religion. In the vulgarly-accepted meaning of the word he may have none. There is great variation among the groups, the tribes even—I venture to say—among the individuals. So far as they believe in anything they believe in the existence of supreme good and bad spirits; but their beliefs are always indefinite, only half understood even by themselves. To a certain extent it is open to the medicine-man, the chief priest of their magico-religious system, to vary, or even to disregard any current belief. Among individuals are to be found sceptics of every grade. On the whole their religion is a theism, inasmuch as their God has a vague, personal, anthropomorphic existence. His habitat is above the skies, the blue dome of heaven, which they look upon as the roof of the world that descends on all sides in contact with the earth. Yet again it is a pantheism, this God being represented in all beneficent nature; for every good thing is imbued with his spirit, or with individual spirits subject to him.