Tobacco Curing
The tobacco leaves are hung in bunches, often under the roof of the corn house, in the milpa, in a free current of air, till they are thoroughly dry; they are then powdered in a shallow basin, or the bottom cut from a large calabash, and mixed with the leaves of the chiohle, a species of vanilla, which gives a distinctive flavor and fragrance to the tobacco; finally the mixture is rolled into cigarettes (chiople) in a covering of corn husk (coloch).
Fig. 10.—Calabash with liana base used in spinning.
Basket and Mat Weaving
Baskets are woven from a special thin tough liana and from split cane; those of liana (ak), which are large and coarse, are commonly used for carrying corn from the milpa, slung over the shoulders like a macapal. The split-cane baskets, which are smaller and more neatly woven, are used in the house for all sorts of domestic purposes.
Henequen fiber is used by the Indians for a great variety of purposes. The fiber is obtained from the leaf, which is cleaned upon a smooth board (pokche) about 4 feet long by 6 inches broad, in the following way: The top of the board is held against the lower part of the operator's chest while the lower end rests on the floor. The leaf is placed on the board and the pulp scraped from the fiber with a bar of hardwood, triangular in section. At the upper end of the board is a deep notch in its side, in which the cleaned part of the leaf is clamped, thus fixing the part which is being scraped. The cleaning has to be done very early in the morning, as when the sun gets hot the juice from the pulp produces an unpleasant itching rash upon the skin. The fiber when cleaned and dried is made into rope and cord; from the cord hammocks, sacks, a coarse kind of cloth, and many other articles are manufactured. Candles are made by dipping a wick of twisted cotton into melted black beeswax (box keb), obtained from wild bees. Sometimes a number of the logs in which the wild bees hive are brought in to the village and placed one above the other, on trestles, to form a sort of apiary, in order that honey and wax may be always obtainable.
Oil for cooking and for burning in small earthenware lamps with twisted cotton wicks is obtained by breaking up the kernel of the cuhoon nut and boiling it in water. A clear rather thin oil floats to the surface, which may easily be skimmed off. Near the sea coconut oil is prepared in the same way.