Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/478

462 the whole plantation has become a swamp, these heaps form little islands amid the ooze, and, in a very dry season, when the savanna has been burned, they stand up like the mounds of the Caribs, to which they are somewhat analogous.

To understand this analogy, we must go back to some past age long before the discovery of America. The original coast line of British Guiana is now some twenty miles inland; but ages ago, no doubt, the present sand-reefs were washed by the ocean. The great rivers brought down sand, mud, and vegetable matter in solution, as they do to-day. These suspended and dissolved substances were deposited in the shape of sandbanks and shoals and became little islands. To these the cannibals retired from all enemies, and enjoyed their horrible feasts in seclusion and without fear, in the way so well described by Defoe.

Under mounds of sand, covered with forest trees, the remains of the Carib's feast can still be found and recognized. These mounds are most common in the northwestern district of British Guiana—the Canibalor Terra of the early voyagers and the Caribana of Raleigh. Some are situated several miles from the present coast line, and were probably occupied for many years, as the heaps of shells, bits of pottery, stone weapons, and, most horrible of all, human bones broken for the marrow, must have taken a long time to accumulate. Now they are hidden in the virgin forest, and only by accident have a few been discovered. Nature has triumphed, and the Carib is virtually extinct.

In one respect the savage leaves a more lasting record of his former presence than the white man. The steel knife or axe crumbles away under the influence of heat and moisture, and even the great iron sugar pan throws oil thick flakes of oxide until it falls into dust. But the stone axe of the Indian is as lasting as the rock itself, and might be safely said to be an imperishable record. Gold-diggers not infrequently come upon them at depths of six or eight feet in our river bottoms, and they are found in canal excavations as well as in the cannibal mounds. In Guiana they are not necessarily ancient, as they were in use everywhere up to three centuries ago, and are still utilized in shaping pottery. Even a century ago it would not have been hard to find some of them put to their proper use—i. e., to scrape away the charred portions of wood in excavating a canoe.

Besides the mounds and stone implements, the educated eye sees other evidences of the Indian's presence at some former time. The Arawak in the past, as in the present, generally made his settlement on a sand reef, and hardly a creek is without indications of his former presence. A stranger is so bewildered with the great tangle of vegetation, and the variety of form and color