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 Most Remote Part Of The Valley Is Covered By A Thick Forest.
In
this shady and solitary spot, on the declivity of a steep mountain,
the cavern of Ataruipe opens to the view.
It is less a cavern than a
jutting rock in which the waters have scooped a vast hollow when, in
the ancient revolutions of our planet, they attained that height.* (*
I saw no vein, no hole (four) filled with crystals. The decomposition
of granitic rocks, and their separation into large masses, dispersed
in the plains and valleys in the form of blocks and balls with
concentric layers, appear to favour the enlarging of these natural
excavations, which resemble real caverns.) In this tomb of a whole
extinct tribe we soon counted nearly six hundred skeletons well
preserved, and regularly placed. Every skeleton reposes in a sort of
basket made of the petioles of the palm-tree. These baskets, which the
natives call mapires, have the form of a square bag. Their size is
proportioned to the age of the dead; there are some for infants cut
off at the moment of their birth. We saw them from ten inches to three
feet four inches long, the skeletons in them being bent together. They
are all ranged near each other, and are so entire that not a rib or a
phalanx is wanting. The bones have been prepared in three different
manners, either whitened in the air and the sun, dyed red with anoto,
or, like mummies, varnished with odoriferous resins, and enveloped in
leaves of the heliconia or of the plantain-tree.
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