Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 24, 1913.djvu/54

42 ground a savannah, a natural geological outcrop, breaks the dense bush with a comparatively open space, where a totally distinct soil and flora will be found. The Boro explanation for these outcrops is that they are where Neva, the Good Spirit, spoke to the Indians when on a visit to earth, in recognition of which they are open to the sun and the sky to this day. The soil in the forest itself is dark and damp, built up of successive layers of decayed vegetable matter. The rainfall is excessive and continual, the temperature hardly varies throughout the year, and heavy storms are frequent, especially in February and September, which roughly stand in Amazonia for the seasons designated as the Rains elsewhere.

Though the forest abounds in flower-bearing plants and trees, fruits of gay colours, birds and insects of the brightest hues, it is a place of dull and oppressive gloom, for all the life, and light, and colouring are massed overhead in the treetops, hidden from sight by a density of foliage, and an intricate tangle of creepers and parasitical growths. The effect of existence in such environment is depressing in the extreme. Everything is against progress. All makes for a dead-level resignation to an intolerable but unavoidable fate. There are no roads of communication except the waterways. Life is a ceaseless warfare with certainly-hostile nature and probably-hostile man. These wild solitudes are inhabited by groups of Indians, as to whose origin and racial classification opinions are greatly divided. In the country now under discussion there are nine language-groups, — the Witoto, Boro, Andoke, Resigero, Muenane, Okaina or Dukaiya, Menimehe, Karahone, and Nonuya. It is with the first two, the Witoto and Boro, that we are mainly concerned. These two language-groups occupy roughly the centre of my field of exploration, and are separated from each other by the Dukaiya-speaking tribes. The Boro tongue is more