In The Dry Season The Land Is Baked By The Intense Heat Of The
Tropical Sun, And Cracked Into Deep Fissures.
In the rainy season it
is an endless marsh - a veritable dead man's land.
During a 200-mile
ride, 180 lay through water with the sun almost vertical. All this
country in past ages must have been the bed of a great salt sea.
As I have said, the Chaco is peculiarly Indian territory, into which
the white man steps at his peril. I accepted a commission, however,
to examine and report on certain parts of it, so I left the civilized
haunts of men and set foot on the forbidden ground.
My first introduction to the savages in Chaco territory was at their
village of Teepmuckthlawhykethy (The Place Where the Cows Arrived).
They were busy devouring a dead cow and a newly-born calf, and I saw
their naked bodies through such dense clouds of mosquitos that in one
clap of the hands I could kill twenty or thirty. This Indian toldo
consists of three large wigwams, in which live about eighty of the
most degraded aborigines to be found on earth. When they learned I
was not one of the Christians from across the river, and that I
came well introduced, they asked: Did I come across the big water
in a dug-out? Was it a day's journey? Would I give them some of "the
stuff that resembles the eggs of the ant?" (their name for rice).
I was permitted to occupy a palm hut without a roof, but I slept
under a tiger's skin, and that kept off dew and rain. They reserved
the right to come and go in it as they pleased. The women, with naked
babies astride their hips, the usual way of carrying them, were
particularly annoying. A little girl, however, perhaps ten years old,
named Supupnik (Sawdust), made friends with me, and that friendship
lasted during all my stay with them. Her face was always grotesquely
painted, but she was a sweet child.
These Indians are of normal stature, and are always erect and
stately, perhaps because all burdens are borne by straps on the
forehead. The expression of the savage is peculiar, for he pulls out
all the hair on his face, even the eyelashes and eyebrows, and seems
to think the omission of that act would be a terrible breach of
cleanliness. These same individuals will, however, frequently be seen
with their whole body so coated with dirt that it could easily be
scraped off with a knife in cakes, as the housewife would scrape a
burnt loaf! The first use to which the women put the little round tin
looking-glasses, which I used for barter, was to admire their pretty
(?) faces; but the men, with a sober look, would search for the
detested hair on lip or chin. That I was so lost to decency as to
suffer a moustache to cover my lip was to them a constant puzzle and
wonder, for in every other respect the universal opinion was that I
was a civilized kind of "thing." I write thing advisedly, for the
white man is to them an inferior creation - not a person.
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