Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 24, 1913.djvu/53

 A SHORT ACCOUNT OF THE INDIANS OF THE ISSÁ-JAPURÁ DISTRICT (SOUTH AMERICA). BY CAPTAIN T. W. WHIFFEN, Fourteenth Hussars. (Read at Meeting, December 18th, 1912.) of the main artery of the great Amazonian system, between the Rio Negro and the Napo, both of which tributaries have long been known to the traveller, trader, and missionary, lies a great stretch of virgin forest, drained by the Issá and the Japurá rivers and their affluents. To the north of the Japura the watershed of an important tributary of the Negro, the Uaupes river, has also been more or less opened to European influences, but the Issá and Japurá basins remained unknown, and are to this day a veritable No-man's- land among the nations, claimed by Brazil, Peru, and Ecuador, but not administered by any : where never a king's writ can run, and where each man does what is, presumably, right in his own eyes and, frequently, egregiously wrong in his neighbour's. The main trend of the country is a gentle slope from north-west to south-east, not sufficient to make the river currents rapid in normal conditions, though the rate of descent naturally increases greatly when flood water is coming down. Inundations are frequent, and a great one probably occurs two or three times in a century. So it is not, therefore, surprising to find that these Indians have many stories of a Great Flood. The land between the river beds is broken by low parallel ranges of hills, densely wooded. Here and thereon higher