Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 2 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
- Page 188 of 208 - First - Home
According To The
Accounts Of The Natives, And Of The Most Intelligent Missionaries,
These Symbolic Signs Resemble Perfectly The Characters We Saw A
Hundred Leagues More To The North, Near Caycara, Opposite The Mouth Of
The Rio Apure.
(See Chapter 2.18 above.)
In advancing from the plains of the Cassiquiare and the Conorichite,
one hundred and forty leagues further eastward, between the sources of
the Rio Blanco and the Rio Essequibo, we also meet with rocks and
symbolical figures. I have lately verified this curious fact, which is
recorded in the journal of the traveller Hortsman, who went up the
Rupunuvini, one of the tributary streams of the Essequibo. Where this
river, full of small cascades, winds between the mountains of
Macarana, he found, before he reached lake Amucu, rocks covered with
figures, or (as he says in Portuguese) with varias letras. We must not
take this word letters in its real signification. We were also shewn,
near the rock Culimacari, on the banks of the Cassiquiare, and at the
port of Caycara in the Lower Orinoco, traces which were believed to be
regular characters. They were however only misshapen figures,
representing the heavenly bodies, together with tigers, crocodiles,
boas, and instruments used for making the flour of cassava. It was
impossible to recognize in these painted rocks* (the name by which the
natives denote those masses loaded with figures) any symmetrical
arrangement, or characters with regular spaces. (* In Tamanac
tepumereme. (Tepu, a stone, rock; as in Mexican, tetl, a stone, and
tepetl, a mountain; in Turco-Tatarian, tepe.) The Spanish Americans
also call the rock covered with sculptured figures, piedras pintadas;
those for instance, which are found on the summit of the Paramo of
Guanacas, in New Grenada, and which recall to mind the tepumereme of
the Orinoco, the Cassiquiare, and the Rupunuvini.) The traces
discovered in the mountains of Uruana, by the missionary Fray Ramon
Bueno, approach nearer to alphabetical writing; but are nevertheless
very doubtful.
Whatever may be the meaning of these figures, and with whatever view
they were traced upon granite, they merit the examination of those who
direct their attention to the philosophic history of our species. In
travelling from the coast of Caracas towards the equator, we are at
first led to believe that monuments of this kind are peculiar to the
mountain-chain of Encaramada; they are found at the port of Sedeno,
near Caycara,* (* In the Mountains of the Tyrant, Cerros del Tirano.)
at San Rafael del Capuchino, opposite Cabruta, and in almost every
place where the granitic rock pierces the soil, in the savannah which
extends from the Cerro Curiquima towards the banks of the Caura. The
nations of the Tamanac race, the ancient inhabitants of those
countries, have a local mythology, and traditions connected with these
sculptured rocks. Amalivaca, the father of the Tamanacs, that is, the
creator of the human race (for every nation regards itself as the root
of all other nations), arrived in a bark, at the time of the great
inundation, which is called the age of water,* when the billows of the
ocean broke against the mountains of Encaramada in the interior of the
land. (* The Atonatiuh of the Mexicans, the fourth age, the fourth
regeneration of the world.) All mankind, or, to speak more correctly,
all the Tamanacs, were drowned, with the exception of one man and one
woman, who saved themselves on a mountain near the banks of the
Asiveru, called Cuchivero by the Spaniards. This mountain is the
Ararat of the Aramean or Semitic nations, and the Tlaloc or Colhuacan
of the Mexicans. Amalivaca, sailing in his bark, engraved the figures
of the moon and the sun on the Painted Rock (Tepumereme) of
Encaramada. Some blocks of granite piled upon one another, and forming
a kind of cavern, are still called the house or dwelling of the great
forefather of the Tamanacs. The natives show also a large stone near
this cavern, in the plains of Maita, which they say was an instrument
of music, the drum of Amalivaca. We must here observe, that this
heroic personage had a brother, Vochi, who helped him to give the
surface of the earth its present form. The Tamanacs relate that the
two brothers, in their system of perfectibility, sought, at first, to
arrange the Orinoco in such a manner, that the current of the water
could always be followed either going down or going up the river. They
hoped by this means to spare men trouble in navigating rivers; but,
however great the power of these regenerators of the world, they could
never contrive to give a double slope to the Orinoco, and were
compelled to relinquish this singular plan. Amalivaca had daughters,
who had a decided taste for travelling. The tradition states,
doubtless with a figurative meaning, that he broke their legs, to
render them sedentary, and force them to people the land of the
Tamanacs. After having regulated everything in America, on that side
of the great water, Amalivaca again embarked, and returned to the
other shore, to the same place from whence he came. Since the natives
have seen the missionaries arrive, they imagine that Europe is this
other shore; and one of them inquired with great simplicity of Father
Gili, whether he had there seen the great Amalivaca, the father of the
Tamanacs, who had covered the rocks with symbolic figures.
These notions of a great convulsion of nature; of two human beings
saved on the summit of a mountain, and casting behind them the fruits
of the mauritia palm-tree, to repeople the earth; of that national
divinity, Amalivaca, who arrived by water from a distant land, who
prescribed laws to nature, and forced the nations to renounce their
migrations; these various features of a very ancient system of belief,
are well worthy of attention. What the Tamanacs, and the tribes whose
languages are analogous to the Tamanac tongue, now relate to us, they
have no doubt learned from other people, who inhabited before them the
same regions.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 188 of 208
Words from 190976 to 191985
of 211397