Owing to the thousands of fleas in the dust of the room it was hard
for me to rest much, and that night a storm brewing made sleep almost
impossible. As the thunder pealed forth all the Indians of the houses
hastily got out of their hammocks and grasped gourd rattles and
beautifully woven cotton banners. The rattles were shaken
and the banners waved, while a droning chant was struck up by the
high priest, and the louder the thunder rolled the louder their
voices rose and the more lustily they shook the seeds in their
calabashes. They were trying to appease the dread deity of Thunder,
as did their Inca ancestors. The voice of the old priest led the
worship, and for four hours there was no cessation of the
monotonous song, except when he performed some mystic ceremony which
I understood not.
Just as the old priest had awakened me the first morning to ask for
his present, so the king came tapping me gently the second. In his
hand he had a large sweet potato, and in my half-dreamy state I heard
him saying, "Give me your coat. Eat a potato?" The change I thought
was greatly to his advantage, but I was anxious to please him. I
possessed two coats, while he was, as he said, a poor old man, and
had no coat. The barter was concluded; I ate the potato, and he, with
strange grimaces, donned a coat for the first time in his life. Think
of this for an alleged descendant of the great Atahuallpa, whose
robes and jewels were priceless!
I offered to give the queen a feminine garment of white cotton if she
would wear it, but this I could not prevail upon her to do; it was
"ugly." As a loin-cloth, she would use it, but put it on - no! In the
latter savage style the shaped garment was thereafter worn. Women
have fashions all over the globe.
The few inches of clothing worn by the Caingwa women are never
washed, and the only attempt at cleansing the body I saw when among
them was that of a woman who filled her mouth with water and squirted
it back on her hands, which she then wiped on her loin-cloth!
Prescott, writing of the Incas, says: "They loved to indulge in the
luxury of their baths, replenished by streams of crystal water which
were conducted through subterraneous silver channels into basins of
gold."
The shapely little mouth of the queen was spoilt by the habit she had
of smoking a heavy pipe made of red clay. I was struck with the
weight and shape of this, for it exactly resembled those made by the
old cliff-dwellers, unknown centuries ago.
