Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 2 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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The Infusion Yields A Yellowish Liquor, Which Tastes Like Milk
Of Almonds.
Sometimes papelon (unrefined sugar) is added.
The
missionary told us that the natives become visibly fatter during the
two or three months in which they drink this seje, into which they dip
their cakes of cassava. The piaches, or Indian jugglers, go into the
forests, and sound the botuto (the sacred trumpet) under the seje
palm-trees, to force the tree, they say, to yield an ample produce the
following year. The people pay for this operation, as the Mongols, the
Arabs, and nations still nearer to us, pay the chamans, the marabouts,
and other classes of priests, to drive away the white ants and the
locusts by mystic words or prayers, or to procure a cessation of
continued rain, and invert the order of the seasons.
"I have a manufacture of pottery in my village," said Father Zea, when
accompanying us on a visit to an Indian family, who were occupied in
baking, by a fire of brushwood, in the open air, large earthen
vessels, two feet and a half high. This branch of manufacture is
peculiar to the various tribes of the great family of Maypures, and
they appear to have followed it from time immemorial. In every part of
the forests, far from any human habitation, on digging the earth,
fragments of pottery and delf are found. The taste for this kind of
manufacture seems to have been common heretofore to the natives of
both North and South America. To the north of Mexico, on the banks of
the Rio Gila, among the ruins of an Aztec city; in the United States,
near the tumuli of the Miamis; in Florida, and in every place where
any traces of ancient civilization are found, the soil covers
fragments of painted pottery; and the extreme resemblance of the
ornaments they display is striking. Savage nations, and those
civilized people* (* The Hindoos, the Tibetians, the Chinese, the
ancient Egyptians, the Aztecs, the Peruvians; with whom the tendency
toward civilization in a body has prevented the free development of
the faculties of individuals.) who are condemned by their political
and religious institutions always to imitate themselves, strive, as if
by instinct, to perpetuate the same forms, to preserve a peculiar type
or style, and to follow the methods and processes which were employed
by their ancestors. In North America, fragments of delf ware have been
discovered in places where there exist lines of fortification, and the
walls of towns constructed by some unknown nation, now entirely
extinct. The paintings on these fragments have a great similitude to
those which are executed in our days on earthenware by the natives of
Louisiana and Florida. Thus too, the Indians of Maypures often painted
before our eyes the same ornaments as those we had observed in the
cavern of Ataruipe, on the vases containing human bones. They were
grecques, meanders, and figures of crocodiles, of monkeys, and of a
large quadruped which I could not recognize, though it had always the
same squat form.
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