第134章

The fate of the little girl, who came with a second batch of children all ill of intermittent fever, a month or two after Sebastian, was very different.She was brought to our house, after landing, one night in the wet season, when the rain was pouring in torrents, thin and haggard, drenched with wet and shivering with ague.An old Indian who brought her to the door said briefly, "ecui encommenda" (here's your little parcel, or order), and went away.There was very little of the savage in her appearance, and she was of a much lighter colour than the boy.We found she was of the Miranha tribe, all of whom are distinguished by a slit, cut in the middle of each wing of the nose, in which they wear on holiday occasions a large button made of pearly river-shell.We took the greatest care of our little patient; had the best nurses in the town, fomented her daily, gave her quinine and the most nourishing food; but it was all of no avail, she sank rapidly; her liver was enormously swollen, and almost as hard to the touch as stone.There was something uncommonly pleasing in her ways, and quite unlike anything I had yet seen in Indians.Instead of being dull and taciturn, she was always smiling and full of talk.We had an old woman of the same tribe to attend her, who explained what she said to us.She often begged to be taken to the river to bathe; asked for fruit, or coveted articles she saw in the room for playthings.Her native name was Oria.The last week or two she could not rise from the bed we had made for her in a dry corner of the room; when she wanted lifting, which, was very often, she would allow no one to help her but me, calling me by the name of "Cariwa " (white man), the only word of Tupi she seemed to know.It was inexpressibly touching to hear her, as she lay, repeating by the hour the verses which she had been taught to recite with her companions in her native village: a few sentences repeated over and over again with a rhythmic accent, and relating to objects and incidents connected with the wild life of her tribe.We had her baptised before she died, and when this latter event happened, in opposition to the wishes of the big people of Ega, I insisted on burying her with the same honours as a child of the whites; that is, as an "anjinho" (little angel), according to the pretty Roman Catholic custom of the country.We had the corpse clothed in a robe of fine calico, crossed her hands on her breast over a "palma" of flowers, and made also a crown of flowers for her head.Scores of helpless children like our poor Oria die at Ega, or on the road; but generally not the slightest care is taken of them during their illness.They are the captives made during the merciless raids of one section of the Miranha tribe on the territories of another, and sold to the Ega traders.The villages of the attacked hordes are surprised, and the men and women killed or driven into the thickets without having time to save their children.There appears to be no doubt that the Miranhas are cannibals, and, therefore, the purchase of these captives probably saves them from a worse fate.The demand for them at Ega operates, however, as a direct cause of the supply, stimulating the unscrupulous chiefs, who receive all the profits, to undertake these murderous expeditions.

It is remarkable how quickly the savages of the various nations, which each have their own, to all appearance, widely different language, learn Tupi on their arrival at Ega, where it is the common idiom.This perhaps may be attributed chiefly to the grammatical forms of all the Indian tongues being the same, although the words are different.As far as I could learn, the feature is common to all, of placing the preposition after the noun, making it, in fact, a post-position, thus: "He is come the village from;" "Go him with, the plantation to," and so forth.

The ideas to be expressed in their limited sphere of life and thought are few; consequently the stock of words is extremely small; besides, all Indians have the same way of thinking, and the same objects to talk about; these circumstances also contribute to the case with which they learn each other's language.Hordes of the same tribe living on the same branch rivers, speak mutually unintelligible languages; this happens with the Miranhas on the Japura, and with the Collinas on the Jurua; whilst Tupi is spoken with little corruption along the banks of the main Amazons for a distance Of 2500 miles.The purity of Tupi is kept up by frequent communication amongst the natives, from one end to the other of the main river; how complete and long-continued must be the isolation in which the small groups of savages have lived in other parts, to have caused so complete a segregation of dialects! It is probable that the strange inflexibility of the Indian organisation, both bodily and mental, is owing to the isolation in which each small tribe has lived, and to the narrow round of life and thought, and close intermarriages for countless generations which are the necessary results.Their fecundity is of a low degree, for it is very rare to find an Indian family having so many as four children, and we have seen how great is their liability to sickness and death on removal from place to place.

I have already remarked on the different way in which the climate of this equatorial region affects Indians and negroes.No one could live long amongst the Indians of the Upper Amazons without being struck with their constitutional dislike to the heat.